PUBLICATION:
Executive Editor-George Clack
Managing Editor-Paul Malamud
Contributing Editors-Mark Jacobs
Michael Bandler
Art Director/Design-Thaddeus A. Miksinski, Jr.
Photo Research-Maggie Johnson Sliker
Web Design-Min-Chih Yao
It avails not, time and place -- distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so
many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and the sky, so I feel,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright
flow, I was refresh'd,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift
current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of the ships and the thickstemm'd pipes of steamboats, I looked.
Walt Whitman, from "Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry," 1856
This book originated as an intriguing suggestion by Mark
Jacobs, a U.S. foreign service officer with our State
Department staff who also happens to be a working novelist.
If we were to ask a contemporary group of American poets,
novelists, critics, and historians what it means to be an
American writer, Jacobs proposed, the results could
illuminate in an interesting way certain America values -freedom, diversity, democracy -- that may not be well
understood in all parts of the world.
In the spirit of trying an experiment, that is what we did.
Choosing 15 writers who have attained a certain stature for
their work, with the group as a whole reflecting the considerable diversity of
American writing today, we commissioned each to write an essay. The assignment:
In what sense do you see yourself as an American writer?
In some ways this approach recalls a long tradition of literary self-analysis in the
United States. Michel Guillaume St. Jean de Crevecoeur famously posed the question
in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782): "What then is the American, this
new man?" In 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson called for intellectual independence from
"the courtly muses of Europe" in his address "The American Scholar." A century later,
Ernest Hemingway defined American writing with his remark: "All modern American
literature comes from one book by Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn." In a sense, we
were asking each author to update the answer to Crevecoeur's question for the 21st
century.
The first thing that strikes one about the responses is how varied these essays are.
America refracted through these writers' minds is not one place but many. Perhaps
it's not so surprising that one person's "American" experience is likely to be quite
different from another's. Ask 15 creative individualists the same question, and
naturally you will get 15 different answers.
On second glance, though, certain common threads appear among the essays. First,
writing careers are rooted in the sensual memories of early childhood, of a particular
time and place, a small town or a farm or a city neighborhood. "All politics is local,"
Tip O'Neill, a Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, once remarked. Our
writers would amend that to, Everything begins at home. For Elmaz Abinader home
is the smell of Arabic bread baked by her mother in a small Pennsylvania town. For
Robert Pinsky it is the whispered stories he heard as a boy in a decaying New Jersey
oceanfront resort. Michael Chabon finds the magic of youth in the whimsical place
names of the new planned city that he grew up in. Historian David Herbert Donald
finds his locus as a writer in the family story-telling traditions of the American South
of his childhood.
Frequently, for this group of writers, the sense of home means an immigrant culture,
with a parent or grandparent from another land. Often there is a "mixed marriage"
that blends different religions or ethnicities into one family for generations after. For
the writer with recent immigrant roots, it seems there are two rites of passage: first,
recognizing both one's longing for and differences from the American mainstream,
and then discovering the integrity of one's own culture. Sven Birkerts's memoir is an
extended meditation on his youthful and largely subconscious infatuation with
Midwestern America, followed by his rediscovery of his Latvian heritage through the
literature of Europe. Julia Alvarez's story of her long journey from a Dominican
dictatorship to American freedom culminates in a moment of bicultural song that
mixes Spanish and English in one poem.
The central word about America for many of these writers is possibility. "Everything
was possible in the United States," Naomi Shihab Nye writes of her Palestinian
father's feelings about his adopted country. "This was not just a rumor, it was true.
He might not grow rich overnight, but he could sell insurance, import colorful gifts
from around the world, start little stores, become a journalist. He could do anything."
At the same time, our authors recognize that American society was and is far from
perfect. Abinader and Alvarez have never forgotten the schoolyard epithets hurled
their way by classmates whose immigrant ancestors were not quite so recent. Thirtyfive years after its birth, Chabon's boyhood home of Columbia, Maryland, founded in
part as an experiment in interracial living, is said to have "crime and racial unrest."
The American Indian poet Linda Hogan is well aware of the sad history of her people
at the hands of the Europeans who colonized this nation.
The greater truth about America, however, for virtually all the writers in this
collection would lie in the faith of the great-uncle of African-American novelist
Charles Johnson. Born in the rural South in 1892, Johnson's Uncle Will moved north
to found and run several businesses -- even as he preached continually the value of
education. "He understood," Johnson writes, "and made us see through personal
example, that while black people had endured often mind-numbing oppression,
America was founded on principles, ideals, and documents?that forced it to be
forever self-correcting. That, he knew, was the ground that nurtured black
Americans. The opportunities denied him would be there for us, he said. But only if
we were educated and hard-working."
Another common passage for our group of writers is a move beyond their personal
experiences and communities -- even beyond their Americanness -- to a powerful
sense of the universal. Bharati Mukherjee calls writers everywhere "a like-minded
tribe. On the international level, I've found serious writers to be universally skeptical
of authority, ironic, and sympathetic to the lost and baffled. They feast on
incongruity and absurdity, they're quick to appreciate another's work and to
recognize the different forces that shape it."
Richard Ford posits an unknown young writer in a distant country pondering what it
means to be a writer. "And he's writing the same things I've written, or better
things," Ford suggests. "Good, I say. For if all these years of being an American have
only readied me to realize that my likeness, my kinship, my collegiality with
someone I'll never know, made me able to live literature's most precious wisdom -then being an American, and a writer no less, has served me very well indeed."
The voice that seems to lie just beneath the surface of many of
these essays is that of the great American poet Walt Whitman
(1819-1892). Poets Robert Creeley and Billy Collins cite
Whitman as an influence; Julia Alvarez ends her essay by
bursting into poetry with "I Too Sing America," an allusion to
Whitman's enduring line "I hear America singing." Few have
ever connected the one -- the individual soul -- with the many
-- the souls of all Americans and all humankind -- more exultantly than Whitman.
The novelist Robert Olen Butler concludes his essay by evoking a connection that
Whitman felt powerfully. "Artists of all the nations of the world pass each day
through the portal of the personal unconscious and enter the depths of the collective
unconscious," Butler writes, "and these artists emerge with visions of things that
bind us all together. I am an American. I am an artist. I look at my country and I
seek the human soul."
-- George Clack, Executive Editor
Just off Main Street
by
Elmaz Abinader
Elmaz Abinader is an ArabAmerican author, poet and
performance artist whose work has
been printed and performed
throughout the United States and
the Middle East. Her most recent
volume, In the Country of My
Dreams..., won the 2000 Josephine
Miles PEN Oakland award for
multicultural poetry. Her first play,
Country of Origin, won two
"Drammies" from Oregon's Drama
Circle, and she is touring with her
second performance piece,
Ramadan Moon. Children of the
Roojme: A Family's Journey from
Lebanon, her first book (Norton,
1991; University of Wisconsin,
1997), is a widely acclaimed
memoir of one family's immigration.
She currently teaches at Mills
College, Oakland, California.
After receiving an M.F.A. degree
in poetry from Columbia University,
where she studied with Philip
Levine, and earning a Ph.D. in
Creative Writing, Abinader won a
post-doctoral fellowship in the
humanities that led to work with
I. Crossing the Threshold
When I was young, my house had a magic door.
Outside that door was the small Pennsylvania town
where I grew up. Main Street ran in front of our house
bearing the standard downtown features: a bank, a
news stand, the hardware store, the auto parts supply,
and other retail businesses. Families strolled the streets,
particularly on weekends looking at the displays of
furniture in Kaufman's giant window, the posters for
movies hanging behind the glass at the Rex Theatre,
and the mannequins, missing hands or fingers, sporting
the latest fashions in the windows of my aunt's clothing
store. In those days, the early 1960s, the small
businesses in a town like Masontown fed the
community's needs for food, clothing, and shelter.
novelist Toni Morrison on Children
of the Roojme. Early in her writing
career, she won an Academy of
American Poets award. Most
recently, she was a Fulbright senior
scholar in Egypt.
Her poetry was first introduced
to the public in Grape Leaves, A
Century of Arab-American Poetry,
edited by Gregory Orfalea and
Sharif Elmusa (University of Utah
Press, 1988). She has produced
several commissioned pieces: two
commemorating the centennial of
Gibran Khalil Gibran and another
honoring the works of musician
Marcel Khalife. Many of her works
have appeared in anthologies.
A creative writing teacher for
years, Elmaz Abinader has focused
on the work of young writers of
color, particularly through her
participation in the Hurston-Wright
Writers' Week West and The Voice
of Our Nations Arts Foundation.
My family's shops took their positions on Main Street as well: Nader's Shoe Store,
Nader's Department Store, and the Modernnaire Restaurant. From the face of it, our
businesses looked like any others and we gratefully satisfied the local mother trying
to buy church-worthy shoes for the children, the father in for a good cigar and the
newspaper, and the after-school crowd, who jittered near the juke box on the
restaurant tiles. My father and my uncle stood in the doorways of their
establishments, perfectly dressed in gray suits and white shirts, ties, and glossy
polished shoes.
At that moment, frozen in second grade, at the threshold of the store, I saw no
difference between my father, uncle, and the people who passed by. Many of them
too sent their children to Mrs. Duffy for piano lessons, shopped at the A & P, and
bar-b-qued in the backyard on the Fourth of July. Many of my dad's customers had
their children in All Saints School with me. Their daughters had shiny bikes with
streamers flowing from the handlebars. The popular girls, Jeannie and Renee, wore
freshly polished Mary Jane shoes every day, and discussed quite vocally their ever
growing collection of Barbie doll paraphernalia. I listened with fascination to the
descriptions of a house for Barbie, her car, and her wardrobe. Jeannie wrapped her
finger around her blond pony tail as she described Barbie's ball gown. Renee pulled
her spit curl into a C as she showed us pictures of her trip to Virginia Beach.
In these moments of social exchange, the illusion of similarity between me and the
girls in my class floated away, bubble light. Despite sharing the same school uniform,
being in the Brownies, singing soprano in the choir, and being a good speller, my life
and theirs were separated by the magic door. And although my classmates didn't
know what was behind that portal, they circled me in the playground and shouted
"darkie" at my braids trying to explode into a kinky mop, or "ape" at my arms
bearing mahogany hair against my olive pale skin. It was dizzying and my stomach
squirrel-squealed in loneliness.
I dragged myself home to our gray-shingled house on Main Street feeling the weight
of my book bag and the heaviness of the differences between me and the girls
jumping rope just across the street. As I pulled on the silver aluminum handle of the
screen door that led to the hallway of our house, the rust crumbled against my
thumb. Nothing was particularly enchanting about this door, but when I entered, the
context of the world changed.
Drawing me from the entrance, down the hall, to the dining room, was one of my
favorite smells. It was Wednesday, the day of the week when my mother covered
the table for eight with newspaper, dragged two large blue cans from the pantry, and
lined up the cookie sheets. By the time I arrived home from school in the afternoon,
the house smelled of Arabic bread and loaves and loaves of the round puffy disks
leaned against each other in rows on the table. She made triangles of spinach pies,
cinnamon rolls, and fruit pies filled with pears from the trees growing on our land.
Before greeting me, she looked up, her face flour-smudged, and said, "There are 68
loaves. You can have one."
By now, my sisters have joined me at one end of the table where we pass the apple
butter to each other to slather on the warm bread. When Arabic bread comes out of
the oven, it is filled with air and looks like a little pillow; as it cools, the bread
flattens to what Americans recognize as "pita" bread. Other bread was rarely eaten
in our house; even when we put hot dogs on the grill, they were dropped into a half
of "cohbs," then covered with ketchup.
The smell was hypnotic and mitigated the melancholy I carried home with my
lessons to do that night. The revelry ended soon after we finished our treat. Each
child of the six of us had after-school duties. My three brothers reported to the store
to clean and manage the inventory, and we three girls shared the demands of house
and garden. In the summer, we weeded, watered, and picked the vegetables; in the
fall, we reported to the basement where we canned fruits, beans, jams, and pickles.
Between these seasons were endless piles of laundry, ironing, and cleaning to
maintain the nine people who filled our little house. Barbies, coloring books, afterschool sports were other children's worlds, not ours.
Behind the magic door, the language shifted as well. Mother-to-daughter orders were
delivered in Arabic -- homework, conversations, and the rosary, in the most precise
English possible. Three things dominated our lives: devotion to God, obedience to
our parents, and good grades in school. A sliver of an error in any of these areas was
punished with swiftness and severity. The reputation of our family relied on our
perfection and my parents had no idea that their struggling-to-be-perfect daughters
digested unsavory ridicule from their peers.
Our social interactions on the other side of the door had little weight inside the house.
We had a different community who gathered on weekends and during the summer.
Relatives from towns around Pennsylvania and Ohio filled our living room and dining
room, circling the table crowded with my mother's fabulous array of Arabic dishes:
hummus, chick bean dip, baba ghanouj, eggplant with sesame, stuffed grape leaves,
shish kebob, kibbee, raw or fried lamb and bulgur wheat patties, a leg of lamb, a
turkey stuffed with rice and raisins and platter after platter of side dishes. The
famous Arabic bread sat skyscraper high on plates at either end.
My uncle, the priest, blessed the table, and the chatter of Arabic began as cousins
dipped their bread, scooped up the tabouleh salad, and daintily bit the sweet baklava
pastry. As the end of the meal approached, we pushed slightly away from the table,
as my father told a story of the old days, or someone read a letter from Lebanon; or
a political argument snarled across the empty dishes.
We girls cleared the table and Arabic music wound its way out of the record player.
Before we knew it, someone started a line dance and others linked arms, and
stomping and kicking and clapping shook the house. As children and as worker bees,
we were busy, both cleaning dishes and bringing the adults anything they wanted, as
well as standing up to having our cheeks pinched and our bodies lifted into the air.
My family scenes filled me with joy and belonging, but I knew none of it could be
shared on the other side of that door. The chant of schoolyard slurs would intensify.
Looking different was enough; having a father with a heavy accent already marked
me, dancing in circles would bury me as a social outcast.
II. Making a Writer
In college, a school one hundred times larger in population than my home town, I
walked the campus with a fascination. Past the line of the ginkgo trees, I entered the
Cathedral of Learning, the skyscraper at the University of Pittsburgh where the
English Department was housed. On the first floor of this beautiful building are the
Nationality Classrooms. These rooms are designed to represent different cultural
notions of classroom design. The English Room featured benches from the House of
Commons, the Hungarian Room presented the paprika- colored panels of flower
design set into the wall, and the Chinese Room, dedicated to Confucius, put the
students in round tables without a sense of hierarchy. We had some classes in these
quarters, often unhappy with the stiffness of the furniture or the care we had to take
with our equipment. One room was locked and could only be seen by permission or
during a tour. I studied the plaque outside the door. The Syria-Lebanese Room. Here
again, a door dividing the outside "American" world from my world. Naturally, I
made it a point to see the room, inviting my friends along.
At the moment we entered, our breath froze. The room was covered in Persian rug
designs, glass multi-colored lights, brass tables, and cushions against the wall
around the perimeter. It was lush and exotic and suddenly the pride of being
associated with this palace worked its way inside of me. In charge of my own identity
in college, I announced my heritage, wrote about my grandmother, cooked Arabic
food for my friends, and played the music of Oum Khalthoum at gatherings at my
house.
It wasn't long before I understood that my display of my Arab-ness served to
exoticize me. In the curriculum, nothing of Arab writing was represented; on
television, the only person associated with Lebanon was Danny Thomas; and
Lawrence of Arabia became the footnote to my culture. Concurrently, the events in
the Middle East clarified the sympathies in the United States as not pro-Arab; and as
I grew, feelings toward Arabs became more negative and sometimes bordered on
distrust, even from my own colleagues.
I persisted in my writing. A poem about my mother leaving Lebanon and making a
home in the United States, a story about my grandfather living like a refugee during
World War I, my father's adventures as a rubber trader in Brazil when he was a
young man became my themes, and I intuitively released these stories and poems
as if the whole history was bottled up inside of me.
Still, my writing was happening inside the door. Outside, in my classroom, in my
bachelor's and master's program, some years later, the literature we read was as
foreign to my natural sensibility as Barbie was to my childhood milieu. The models
for writers included a substantial number of European-identified male authors who
wrote eloquently about mainstream American culture. In my writing corner of the
world, I penned stories of children dying during the Ottoman siege of our village in
Lebanon. I felt music in my poetry that was strange to American ears; my images
gathered in a shiny brocade of detail, more lush than other writing of the 1970s.
I did not feel welcome outside the door.
But I persisted. Somewhere in my journey, I put my hand on a book that made the
difference. The title first attracted me: The Woman Warrior, and the author had a
name that was uncommon: Maxine Hong Kingston. Inside this book, I discovered a
grandmother who talked stories, daughters who were too American for their family;
a culture completely strange to the people around them. In essence, this writer knew,
she knew, what was inside the door and she wrote about it. This book not only led
me to the body of literature available in the Chinese-American canon, but I found
African-American, Latino, Native American writers, whose voices resounded about
some of the same issues: belonging, identity, cultural loneliness, community, and
exoticization.
The strains of my music seeped through cracks and under the threshold, the stomp
of the dance pushed the door out of the way. I listened to Toni Morrison in an
interview answer the question, "Do you write because of racism?" She said, "I write
in spite of racism." Writers were claiming their place not only in literature, but also in
the perception of history.
Participating in activism had always been an important part of being a citizen of the
United States for me. My years were marked with political causes for which I
marched, protested, signed petitions, and organized committees. Now I began to
understand: As a writer, I was also an activist. Telling a good story, writing a
beautiful poem pierced the reader more deeply than any rhetoric could manage.
In addition, I found a community: American writers and artists of color often travel
the same terrain as I do, living with dual sensitivities, negotiating where one culture
I inhabit conflicts with my other culture, looking for a place that is home.
Times have been challenging for Arab-Americans because our countries of origin are
often embroiled in conflict and political controversy. The more difficult it becomes,
the bigger role my good story and my beautiful poem play in contributing to a
perspective of the events and the people. Readers will often trust literature more
than speeches or articles, and I find that my love of writing is interwoven with my
responsibility to write.
I have a new small town. It's not anywhere in particular, or maybe it's everywhere.
In this village, people live with their doors open, moving back and forth over the
threshold of what has been exclusive to what will some day be inclusive. As a writer,
I make my life known and woven into the fabric of literature. As an activist, I look
toward other young writers of color and let them know, they might have to lean with
their shoulder, put their whole body into it, but if they push on that door it will
eventually open.
I, Too, Sing América
by
Julia Alvarez
A native of the Dominican Republic,
Julia Alvarez came to the United
States when she was young -- yet,
her Spanish-speaking heritage has
illuminated her literary work in
English. Alvarez writes that, thanks
to a grant from Phillips Andover
Academy in 1980, "I took a summer
off to try my hand at writing fiction,
for my own Island background was
steeped in a tradition of storytelling
that I wanted to explore in prose," a
decision that helped her become a
writer of novels, as well as of prizewinning verse, and books for young
readers.
Her published work includes
How the García Girls Lost Their
Accents, a novel (Chapel Hill:
Algonquin Books, 1991), In The
Time of the Butterflies, a novel
(Algonquin, 1994), The Other Side,
poems (Dutton, 1995),
Homecoming: New and Collected
Poems (New York: Plume, 1996),
¡YO!, a novel (Algonquin: 1997),
and In The Name of Salomé, a
novel (Algonquin, 2000), and much
other work.
Julia Alvarez received a B.A.
degree from Middlebury College, in
Vermont, in 1971, and a Masters in
Creative Writing from Syracuse
University in 1975. She has
frequently taught on the staff of the
Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and
has held teaching positions at
Phillips Andover Academy; the
University of Vermont; George
Washington University, Washington,
D.C.; and the University of Illinois
at Urbana. She is currently writerin-residence at Middlebury College.
Alvarez was named "woman of
the year" by Latina Magazine in
2000. In that same year she
journeyed to the Dominican
Republic to attend the inauguration
of the new president, as part of the
official U.S. delegation. How the
García Girls Lost Their Accents was
picked by New York Librarians as
one of 21 classics for the 21st
century. In the Time of the
Butterflies was selected a Notable
Book in 1994 by the American
Library Association, and was a Book
I would never have become a writer unless my family
had emigrated to the United States when I was ten
years old.
I grew up in the '50s in a dictatorship on the little
Caribbean half-island of the Dominican Republic.
Although it was a highly oral culture rich in storytelling,
it was not a literary culture. I grew up among people
who thought of reading as an antisocial activity that
could ruin your health and definitely take the fun out of
life.
of the Month Club choice in that
year. Her poem "Bookmaking"
appeared in The Best American
Poetry 1991. In addition to many
other awards and honors, Ms.
Alvarez has been elected to the
National Members Council of the
PEN American Center.
"Because of my current
involvement in a sustainable
organic farm with a literacy center
in the mountains of the Dominican
Republic, I've become interested in
children's literature," Alvarez writes.
She has recently published "three
books for young readers," including
The Secret Footprints (New York:
Knopf, 2000) and How Tía Lola
Came to Stay (New York: Knopf,
2001).
Reading/studying was not an activity that was
encouraged in my family, especially for us girls. My
grandmother, who only went up to fourth grade, used
to tell the story that she only picked up a book when
she heard the teacher's donkey braying as it climbed up the hill to her house.
Boys had to make the sacrificio and get an education in order to earn a living -- but
in moderation. My cousin was considered strange because he not only loved to read
but as a teenager began to write poetry. "Se va a enfermar," my aunt would say,
shaking her head every time she found Juan sitting in a chair, reading a book. "He's
going to get sick."
I was also growing up in a repressive and dangerous dictatorship. In a social studies
class, a student wrote an essay in which he praised Trujillo, the dictator, as the true
father of our country. The teacher commented that certainly Trujillo was one of the
fathers of our country, but there were others. The boy, the son of a general, must
have gone home and told his father. That night the teacher, his wife, and his two
young children disappeared. Intellectuals, people who read and questioned, were
suspect. A book in your hands might as well have been contraband.
In 1960, my father's underground activities against Trujillo were discovered, and we
were forced to escape the country in a hurry. The minute we landed on American soil
we became "spics" who spoke our English with heavy accents, immigrants with no
money or prospects. Overnight, we had lost everything, our country, our home, our
extended family structure, our language, for Spanish was the language of home, of
la familia, of self understanding. We arrived in the United States at a time in history
that was not very welcoming to people who were different, whose skins were a
different color, whose language didn't sound like English. For the first time in my life
I experienced prejudice and playground cruelty. I struggled with a language and a
culture I didn't understand. I was homesick and heartbroken.
My sisters and I, being young, soon rallied to the challenge. We learned the new
language, the new music, the new ways to dress and behave ourselves. But our
success on these fronts soon created another kind of problem in our family. My
parents wanted desperately to keep us to the old standards, and yet they also
wanted us to succeed in this new culture. How could we study hard and earn all A's
and get ahead but be sweet and submissive and let Papi make all the decisions? How
could we remember our Spanish when we were forced to speak only English outside
the home? How could we keep our mouths shut out of respeto for our parents when
in school we were being taught to speak up and debate, if need be, with our teachers?
How could we get along with our friends and yet never go over to their houses for
parties and sleepovers because they might have older brothers or parents who
allowed things my parents did not allow?
My sisters and I were caught between worlds, value systems, languages, customs.
And this was our challenge, which is the challenge for many of us who are
immigrants into a new world that is different from the old one of childhood: how to
maintain a connection to our traditions, our roots, and also to grow and flourish in
our new country? How to find creative ways to combine our different worlds, values,
conflicting and sometimes warring parts of our selves so that we can become more
expansive, not more diminished human beings?
But the problem was that no one was thinking like that back in those days. This was
the United States of the early '60s, still locked in the civil rights struggles, prewomen's movement, pre-Equal Rights Amendment movement, pre-multicultural
studies, pre-anything but the melting pot, that old assimilationist, mainstreaming
model. Those were the days when the model for immigration was that you came to
America, you assimilated, you cut off your ties to the past and the old ways, and that
was the price you paid for the privilege of being an American citizen.
But sometimes it is these painful moments that can become opportunities for
expansion and self-creation. I had become a hybrid -- as all of us who travel beyond
an original self or hometown or homeland are bound to become. I was not a
mainsteam American girl and I wasn't a totally Dominican girl anymore. And yet I
wanted desperately to belong somewhere. It was this intense loneliness and desire
to connect with others that led me to books. Homesick and lonely in the USA, I soon
discovered that the world of the imagination was a portable homeland where
everybody belonged. I began to dream that maybe I, too, could create worlds where
no one would be barred.
And so, it was through the wide open doors of its literature that I truly entered this
country. Reading Mr. Walt Whitman, I heard America's promise and I fell in love with
my new country. "I hear America singing, its varied carols I hear." As for melting all
our variety into one mainstream model, Mr. Whitman disagreed: "I am large, I
contain multitudes." This country was a nation of nations, a congregation of races. "I
resist anything better than my own diversity."
Was this allowed? I wondered, looking over my shoulder. Wasn't this subversive? But
Mr. Whitman's poems were printed in my English textbook where he was described
as "the poet of America." He was saying what this country was really all about.
Although America seemed to have forgotten its promises, its writers remembered
and reminded us.
Slowly and not without struggle, America began to listen. As the 1960s progressed
into the '70s, the country around me began to change. Under pressure from its own
marginalized populations and from its growing number of immigrants, the nation was
being forced to acknowledge its own diversity and become more inclusive. Citizens
were challenging America to be true to its promises. The first time I attended a
march in support of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution and was not
hauled off to be tortured in a dark prison chamber by the secret police, I understood
that a free country was not one that was free of problems or inequalities or even
hypocrisies. Such failures came with the territory of being a human being. Freedom
was the opportunity to shape a country, to contribute to the ongoing experiment,
never tried before, of making out of the many, one nation, indivisible with liberty and
justice for all. The words were not just rhetoric. It was our right and responsibility to
make the words come true, for ourselves and for others.
As the nation changed, our literature began to reflect these changes as well. Not only
was there a Mr. Whitman, I discovered, but a Mr. Langston Hughes.
I, too, sing America
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed -I, too, am America.
Oh, that was music to my ears! I understood what Mr. Hughes was saying: he was
claiming his place in the chorus of American song. This was an important voice for a
young girl of another culture and language and background to hear.
But the publishing world dragged its feet. In the early '80s, when I started sending
out my manuscripts, the major publishers and mainstream market were reluctant to
take a chance on new voices. Until they noticed that Afro-American literature had
become a serious component of many college curriculums. That readers were buying
up copies of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Oscar Hijuelos, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine
Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Gish Jen. The complexion of literary Americans had
changed.
In 1991 when I was 41 years old, after over 25 years of struggling, my first novel,
How the García Girls lost Their Accents, was published by a small publisher willing to
take a chance on a new voice. Eleven years later the book has been adopted as a
text in many high schools and colleges. I, too, am now singing America.
I tell this story of my struggle to become an American writer because it was a
struggle I shared with a country that was also struggling to become a more inclusive
and representative nation. I feel lucky and privileged to have been part of this
historical process. America gave me the gift of helping me discover and cultivate my
talents. I would not have become a writer had I not come to this country as a young
girl in 1960.
But as President Kennedy said, a few months after our arrival in this country, "Ask
not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." My
debt to my country is to pass on that opportunity to others. "The function of
freedom," Toni Morrison has said, "is to free someone else." My work as well as my
vote contribute to the richness and diversity of the whole. By our active and
committed presence as citizens of different ethnicities, races, traditions, and
linguistic backgrounds, we challenge America to expand its understanding and
compassion and thus grow stronger as a nation. We infuse its literature with new
energy. We sing new rhythms, inflections, stories, traditions into the whole.
But my responsibility does not stop within the American borders. Unlike the old
model of immigration, many of us immigrants continue to go back to where we
originally came from. With the vast migrations and mobility of the second half of this
passing century, most of us no longer fit the tight definitions of identity we were
born into. Last year in California I met an Afro-Dominican-American who had married
a Japanese woman and had a little baby. Their son is an Afro-Dominican-JapaneseAmerican. My Dominicana sister is married to a Danish man; her kids know Danish,
English, and Spanish, and you know what they love to eat, arroz con habichuelas
with pickled herrings. We are becoming a planet of racial and cultural hybrids. We
need an open mind and a big heart and a compassionate imagination to allow for all
the combinations we are becoming as a nation and as a human family. Mr.
Whitman's words remind us: "The United States themselves are essentially the
greatest poem. . . Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. . . .
and the American bard shall be kosmos. . . glad to pass any thing to any one."
To create this kind of nation is to present a model of a world where we all belong.
But this America can only be achieved if each person is free to be the rich and
complex person he or she is. The dangers to be reductive are tempting, to hole down
in our racial and ethnic bunkers and forget that out of the pluribus we have to make
unum, one human family.
I would go even further and say that to embrace our selves in all our complexity and
richness and also to embrace the multiplicity of selves out there -- that is our
challenge not just as Americans but as human beings. Robert Desnos, the French
poet who died in a concentration camp, once said: "The challenge of being a human
being is not only to be oneself, but to become each one." Terrence, the Roman slave
who freed himself with his writing, put it another way, "I am a human being," he said.
" Nothing human is alien to me." By becoming all we can individually be and by
never forgetting our responsibility of helping each other achieve that same goal, we
can create a nation and a world where everyone belongs and where each and every
one of us has our song.
In this spirit, I see myself more and more as an American writer, not just in the
national but in the hemispheric sense. With my roots in the southern part of the
Americas (my stories, my history, my traditions, my Spanish and Caribbean rhythms)
and my training and experience and flowering in the northern part of the hemisphere,
I am truly an all-American writer:
I, Too, Sing América.
I know it's been said before
but not in this voice
of the plátano
and the mango,
marimba y bongó,
not in this sancocho
of inglés
con español.
Ay sí,
it's my turn
to oh say
what I see,
I'm going to sing America!
with all América
inside me:
from the soles
of Tierra del Fuego
to the thin waist
of Chiriquí
up the spine of the Mississippi
through the heartland
of the Yanquis
to the great plain face of Canada -all of us
singing America,
the whole hemispheric
familia
belting our canción,
singing our brown skin
into that white
and red and blue song -the big song
that sings
all America,
el canto
que cuenta
con toda América:
un new song!
Ya llegó el momento,
our moment
under the sun -ese sol that shines
on everyone.
So, hit it maestro!
give us that Latin beat,
¡Uno-dos-tres!
One-two-three!
Ay sí,
(y bilingually):
Yo también soy América
I, too, am America
Langston Hughes selection is from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, by Langston Hughes. Copyright ©
1994 by the estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House.
Permission also obtained from Harold Ober associates.
The Compulsory Power of American Dreams
by
Sven Birkerts
Described by one commentator as
"the modern master of the literary
essay," Sven Birkerts has
published a number of well-received
volumes on literary and cultural
topics. His major works include An
Artificial Wilderness: Essays on
20th-Century Literature (Morrow,
1987); The Electric Life: Essays on
Modern Poetry (Morrow, 1989);
American Energies: Essays on
Fiction (Morrow, 1992); The
Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of
Reading in an Electronic Age (Faber
& Faber, 1994); Readings
(Graywolf, 1998); My Sky Blue
Trades (Graywolf, 2002). Birkerts'
essays and reviews have appeared
in the New York Times Book
Review, the Atlantic, Harper's, the
New Republic, the Nation, the
American Scholar, and other
publications.
In The Gutenberg Elegies, he
writes "Our growing immersion in
interactive electronic
communication" may be "cutting us
off from the civilizing powers of the
written word" and that "electronic
books and interactive videos will
leach away our capacities for
reflection." Such a concern comes
as no surprise from a literary
intellectual who writes in the essay
below how reflection and reading, of
the most recondite nature, helped
him discover his own identity and
define his relationship to the
For the past four years I have been working on a
American commercial culture that
coming-of-age memoir, the original point of which was
has surrounded him since he was
born in 1951, the child of European
to explore from a number of vantages how I factored
immigrants, in Pontiac, Michigan.
my way through the ancient Freudian equation of love
Birkerts' awards include the
and work to arrive at a sense of my vocation as a writer, Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
but which turned out, far more than I could have
from the National Book Critics'
Circle (1985); a Lila Wallaceimagined, to be an account of my struggle with my
Reader's Digest Foundation grant
sense of heritage, an exploration of how my densely
(1991); and a Guggenheim
grown Latvian root-system could have produced a
Foundation grant (1994).
growth so yearningly American. And if I felt, when I
From 1994 to the present,
Birkerts has been a member of core
recently finished, that I had at last come to grips with
faculty at the Bennington Writing
the major issues of identity formation, I also discovered Seminars, and from 1997 he has
as soon as I let my parents and siblings read the result been a lecturer at Mount Holyoke
College. Literary journals with which
that however much I had achieved resolution on the
he has had significant connections
page, in the family realm -- the force-field of origins -include Wigwag, Mirabella, Esquire,
I had only confirmed my troubled apostasy. The
and, as editor, Agni.
question of how being an American informs my life as a
writer remains in many ways as charged as it has ever been.
Some background: I was born in Pontiac, Michigan, in 1951 to Latvian parents, both
recently immigrated from displaced-persons areas in Germany where they had found
themselves at the end of the war. Both sides of the family claimed artistic pedigree.
My mother's father was a landscape painter trained at the Moscow Academy, while
my father's parents were both literary intellectuals -- his mother a folklorist,
philologist, and teacher, and his father the author of many books of psychology,
sociology, and folklore studies.
While Latvian culture -- and the Latvian language in particular -- were sacrosanct in
our household, my parents themselves were not, unlike many of their fellow LatvianAmericans, cultural preservationists. Rather, they saw themselves as riding the wave
of emancipated modernism and were keenly attuned to the contemporary. My father,
a highly ambitious young architect, worked at Eero Saarinen's legendary firm in
Bloomfield Hills, sitting elbow to elbow with young designers like Kevin Roche, Robert
Venturi, Cesar Pelli, and Charles Eames. Here was the gospel of the new, of an
international language of form, even as, in my father's case, it was cut across with, if
not at some level contradicted by, a deep rootedness in the powerful folk culture of
the homeland.
Myself, I knew no division of loyalties-not consciously, anyway. My ruling obsession
through all the years of my growing up was to shed every trace of foreignness -otherness -- and to become a full-fledged American. And in this I suffered deeply
and decisively. I knew so clearly what I wanted. I wanted to be cut to the pattern of
the kids around me, in the neighborhood, at school. I wanted to be an easy athletic
guy named Bob or Mark, or nicknamed "Chip," with a normal crewcut (I was cursed
with thick curly hair) and acceptably normal-acting parents; I wanted the shine of a
new Ford (my parents bought foreign cars), and an oiled mitt for playing catch in the
yard with my Dad (who after all these years -- he is in his late 70s -- has never to
my knowledge had a hand inside a baseball glove).
It was not a tall order, as dreams go, but I might just as well have asked to be a
Ninja warrior or a gaucho from the Argentine pampas. For whatever things may have
looked like from the outside, from my tyrannical perspective we could not even begin
to fit in. We were strangers from a strange land. My father's name, not Jack or Ted,
was Gunnar, my mother's, Sylvia. I was, God help me, Sven, though I contested the
roll call every year on the first day of school and announced that I was Peter -"Pete" -- which was my middle name. I could do nothing about the fact that we
spoke Latvian at home, and that my parents had no qualms whatsoever about
speaking the language when we were all together in public. I went through every
family outing preemptively tensed against the inevitable eruption of the mother
tongue. As for our house, it was all edges and glass inside, without a single
concession to coziness. I kept my friends away.
As I ached with all my being for an American normalcy and blazed with ill-concealed
shame at the slightest mark of our difference, I went through my days playing a role,
imitating my fortunate friends, wearing one mask after another, simulating in my
least mannerism, my every slangy turn of phrase, a belonging I never felt for a
moment. "Hey Rick, are you guys gonna hang around here?" And: "Naw, I can't, my
dad wants me to do some stuff around the house -- see ya." It was a complete
charade, and it persisted, changing only its subtler inflections, well into my late teens,
when the counterculture explosion suddenly made it permissible, even desirable, to
be "weird" and "different."
From the first, then, my deepest sense of what it meant to be American was shaped
by these fantasies of the unattainable other. There was nothing ecumenical, nothing
remotely melting-pot, about any of it, no place for anything beyond stick-figure
simplicity: the limber gods of the baseball diamond, their booster dads stationwaggoning to games, their pert mothers hanging fresh-looking sheets on the line in
the yard and filling shopping carts with hamburger buns and corn.
I was startled, years later, when I read Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (l969), to
feel a deep jolt of recognition in Alex Portnoy's fantasies about the essence of
goyishness, embodied here in his fantasies of the perfect shikse ice-skater:
"But who wants character? I want Thereal McCoy! In her blue parka and her red
earmuffs and her big white mittens -- Miss America, on blades! With her mistletoe
and her plum pudding (whatever that may be), and her one-family house with a
banister and a staircase, and parents who are tranquil and patient and dignified, and
also a brother Billy who knows how to take motors apart and says "Much obliged,"
and isn't afraid of anything?"
And:
"I too want to be the boyfriend of Debbie Reynolds -- it's the Eddie Fisher in me
coming out, that's all, the longing in all us swarthy Jewboys for those bland blond
exotics called shikses?" In my case the energy of longing was identical -- it simply
had as its target a whole imagined thing called Americanness. Though of course the
imagined, the fantasied, is as real in its effects as any set of concrete circumstances.
What a drama of self-hatred -- Roth's ethnic, mine -- what, cultural? Where did it
originate? For me it was less a matter of overtly despising my origins -- though for
many years I believed this to be the case -- than it was of somehow believing,
"buying," the rightness of the images beamed at me from all directions -- from
billboards and magazine ads, from our newly acquired black-and-white TV set with
its streaming constant revelation of effortless American perfection, what we now all
recognize as the kitsch of Ozzie and Harriet, The Donna Reed Show, My Three Sons,
and the like. Through my daily jarring collisions with what I was not, I built my
picture of authentic exalted Americanness.
This desire to assimilate could not have served for much in my literary formation, as
a writer, except insofar as it deepened my self-evolved intuition of difference, of
being somehow deeply alien, of not truly possessing those "inalienable" rights
advertised in the Constitution. And certainly this latter awareness became the
seedbed of various writerly longings. But the sense of difference, especially when
one is young, does not exult in itself. It looks for connections, corroborations,
anything that will cut against the feeling of being separate. And when that is not
immediately available in the surrounding world, one searches by proxy. I found what
I needed in books -- almost right from the start. First via escapism and fantasy
projection -- living vicariously the perfectly American lives of the Hardy brothers,
Frank and Joe, or the various athletes and heroes who bulked up so convincingly in
the boys' books I devoured.
But these immersions were as nothing compared with what happened in my early
teens when the first reversal happened. My reading shifted, became literary. Through
The Catcher in the Rye, then A Separate Peace, and Thomas Wolfe's Eugene Gant
novels, I encountered the voice of alienated adolescence. Now the plots quite literally
thickened, and I experienced a major, route-altering swerve in my orientation to
things. Hearing the voice of Holden Caulfield was like coming home. I understood
that I was not alone in my view of the world. The universe of print was suddenly
alive with possibility. Reading, and by extension writing, became a mission of rescue.
My feelings of disaffection and difference connected directly with the expressed
outsiderness of my new literary heroes, and when this combined with the tectonic
shifts in American cultural life -- the bourgeoning of rock & roll, of hippiedom, of
protest, of everything that would get brewed together as the counterculture of the
late l960s -- a very different take on what had been my American "ideal" resulted.
Now, indulging my frustration, my accumulated rage at the years of perceived
exclusion, I inverted everything. The square-jawed, right-thinking American, my
former ideal, was abruptly recast in my mind as the embodiment of the "hawk"
mentality -- he (my heroes had all been male) became the target of my most
withering scorn. I mocked the very figures I had so fervently admired before. At the
same time, I struggled to make a place for all of those I had formerly ignored -- the
minorities, the poor, all of those apostrophized by Allen Ginsberg in "Howl," my
revisionist American Bible. I was drawn to LeRoi Jones' Blues People and Franz
Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth -- if only for the suggestion of the titles.
How has being American affected my thinking, my work as a writer? Better, maybe,
to ask how being Latvian has affected my sense of what it means to be American. By
young manhood, after the long frenzied interlude of the '60s, the most powerfully
formative years behind me, I believed I had left that ancient vexation behind. I
would even say I had stopped thinking in those terms, didn't question my
Latvianness or Americanness. I had no room for the big generalities. I was too busy
with the high-resolution immediacies of finding work, finding love, and trying to find
a way to become a writer. The collapse of the counterculture and the prolonged
sense of public ennui that followed had everyone tending their own gardens -- so it
seemed.
But of course the issues, the questions never went away. I simply stopped seeing
them. When they resurfaced, it was covertly, and it would be years before I realized
what was happening.
The change, the awakening, came when I was in my late 20s. I was living in
Cambridge, barely supporting myself working as a bookstore clerk, profoundly
depressed by the collapse of a long relationship, and utterly stalled in my efforts to
write fiction. If there was any light, any sanity, in my life, it was reading. Always a
reader, I went at it with a genuine fervor during this period. Days, weeks, months
marched by outside the window while I sat in a cheap sling chair in my little room in
the apartment I shared with a young would-be poet, smoking cigarettes and reading
novels. More specifically, I read foreign novels, novels in translation, European
novels. I read Knut Hamsun and Thomas Mann and Max Frisch and Heinrich B?and a
dozen others, the more obscure the better. I found myself powerfully drawn to the
settings of these novels, the moods, to everything that made them different from the
domestic fiction I had been reading for years. I had no sense, though -- none that I
recall -- of being drawn toward anything that felt like my own culture of origin. I just
read and steered my daydreaming self through these strangely kindred atmospheres.
Then I had my breakthrough. In the course of my peregrinations, I fell into the
extraordinary world of Robert Musil's great epic of pre-war Viennese life, The Man
Without Qualities. And now, along with the more familiar sensations of psychological
kinship came something new. Reading began to tip me back toward writing. Only
now it was not fiction that compelled me, but reflection. I experienced a deep
compulsion to get closer, to annex my various feelings and reactions by writing
about them.
I labored for long weeks over an essay on Robert Musil and his unfinished
masterpiece. I read everything that had been translated; I read books about the
culture of Vienna in the early decades of the century. I projected myself at that world
with great intensity, imagining the narrow streets, the public gardens, the cafes, the
ritualized social lives of the Viennese bourgeoise. I seemed to see it all so clearly, the
rituals and tonalities of that old world. The only thing I didn't see was the obvious,
and this did not come to me until, decades later, I was in the last stages of writing
my memoir.
I mean: In living for so long inside this vividly imagined world, I was, in essence,
connecting with the story-world I had grown up with. Musil's Vienna -- the times, the
culture, the brooding baroque mise en scene -- was in many ways a filter for Riga,
for the lives of my grandparents and, to a lesser degree, my parents in the
childhoods I had dreamed for them. The images I drew upon were the images I had,
in spite of myself, stored from the earliest days of my childhood. There was, I
realized, a continuum, a direct flow of energy between everything I had absorbed of
family lore, the photographs and postcards I had pondered (never mind my insistent
desire to assimilate as a regular American boy), and the settings and atmospheres
that held me in thrall in Musil's novel. That Europe was deeply familiar to me; it was
an intimate saturation that compelled me in every way.
The writing of that first essay led to others, many if not most of them on European
subjects, and one day -- ever slow about these recognitions -- I saw that I had
staked out a particular literary terrain: I was the critic who would broker between
American literary culture and the great richness of literature in translation, mainly
European. My first book was An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on Twentieth Century
Literature, followed, two years later, by The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry.
It was not until my third collection, American Energies: Essays on Fiction, that I was
ready to take on the writers of my own culture.
I linger thus over my literary resume because it makes what suddenly seems like an
obvious point, though one that I was oblivious to for years: that the whole path of
my life -- writing life included -- has been profoundly conditioned, first by the
determined rejection, and then the veiled acceptance of my culture of origins, and
that this dynamic has been conditioned at the deepest root level by a very powerful,
if distorted, sense of what it means to be American.
I am talking here about the primitive, almost pre-logical compulsion I felt as a son of
recent immigrants to merge myself with the world I saw around me, a world which,
owing to accidents (or fates) of place and time, took on an absolute aspect.
Interestingly, though, it was not just my chimera. This America I sought mapped
almost perfectly to the stereotype that is to this day prominent, if not dominant, in
the global image culture: the prosperous, athletic, decent, white all-American. In
buying the American Dream, which I did with such zealous intensity, I was really
buying a fantasy spun for me by Madison Avenue.
It took the '60s to jolt me from those complacencies. Then, driven by the contrarian
emancipatory energies of the counterculture and the encounters of experience, as
well as by the recognitions of an ever-widening grasp of domestic and global reality - I set myself against the tyranny of that stereotype. I fought to reject these most
deeply planted residues, and flattered myself -- don't we all? -- that I had succeeded.
And indeed, I like to think that whatever I now comprehend as American has
everything to do with notions of ethnicity and diversity (obligatory buzz-phrase
though it is), and that transformed awareness exerts pressure on my thinking and
writing at every turn. But, truth be told, it is not formative in the same way; it is laid
on top of the other, the visceral. I might wish this otherwise. A different core
awareness, a less obsessive investment in these fantasies of WASP normalcy might
have made my passage easier, less painful. Alas, intriguing as these surmises can be,
they lead us exactly nowhere. We are shaped by what we dream, and there we have
no control.
A Postcard from America
by
Robert Olen Butler
Robert Olen Butler has published
12 books since 1981, 10 novels The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs,
Countrymen of Bones, On Distant
Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They
Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr.
Spaceman and Fair Warning -- and
two volumes of short fiction -Tabloid Dreams and A Good Scent
The picture postcard is nearly ninety years old. It is
an original photograph, taken by someone with the
newly invented Kodak Brownie camera and then printed
onto a stiff piece of cardboard with a postcard back.
This was a common practice in the early 20th century in
America. People took photos of every aspect of their
daily lives and sent the images through the mail to
each other. This particular image is of an achingly
fragile biplane, in the perilous early days of aviation,
flying solitary before an empty sky. If you look closely
you can see the right end of the upper wing beginning
to tear away. The message on the back of the card
simply reads: "This is Earl Sandt of Erie Pa. in his
aeroplane just before it fell."
I have been collecting old American postcards for more
than a decade. My collection focuses to some extent on
the images on the fronts of the cards -- this one,
certainly, was extraordinary -- but even more so on the
messages on the backs. Before telephones were
common, people would not infrequently speak their
hearts on the backs of postcards.
As a writer -- a writer whose work, I feel, is deeply
rooted in the spirit of America -- I am enchanted with
these messages. An artist of any nationality is keenly
attuned to nuance and innuendo and subtext, to the
revelation of personality and the deep yearning in every
human heart. And these fragments of voices of
Americans who have long since passed away are
profoundly resonant not only of the individual lives
pulsing behind the words but also of the preoccupations
and character of this nation in the early years of what
would be an extraordinary century.
I am now beginning to write a book of short stories
based on my collection of American postcards from the
from a Strange Mountain, which
won the 1993 Putlitzer Prize for
Fiction.
His stories have appeared
widely in such publications as The
New Yorker, Esquire, the Paris
Review, Harper's, GQ, Zoetrope,
Hudson Review, the Virginia
Quarterly Review, and the Sewanee
Review. They also have been
chosen for inclusion in four annual
editions of The Best American Short
Stories, seven annual editions of
New Stories from the South, and
numerous college literature
textbooks from such publishers as
Simon & Schuster, Norton, Viking,
Little Brown & Co., Houghton
Mifflin, Oxford University Press,
Prentice Hall, and Bedford/St.
Martin. His works have been
translated into a dozen languages,
including Vietnamese, Thai, Korean,
Polish, Japanese and Greek.
A recipient of both a
Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction
and a National Endowment for the
Arts grant, Butler also won the
Richard and Hinda Rosenthal
Foundation Award from the
American Academy of Arts and
Letters and was a finalist for the
PEN/Faulkner Award. His short story
"Fair Warning" won a 2001 National
Magazine Award in Fiction, which
and is the basis for his new novel of
the same name. He was also a
charter recipient of theTu Do Chinh
Kien Award given by the Vietnam
Veterans of America for
"outstanding contributions to
culture by a Vietnam veteran."
Since 1995, he has written
feature-length screenplays for New
Regency, Twentieth Century Fox,
Warner Brothers, Paramount,
Disney, and Universal Pictures and
two teleplays for Home Box Office.
He is the Francis Eppes Professor
holding the Michael Shaara Chair in
Creative Writing at Florida State
University in Tallahassee, Florida.
Butler is married to the novelist and
playwright Elizabeth Dewberry.
first two decades of the last century. There will be two dozen or more stories, with
the front and the back of each card reproduced as a kind of found epigraph. I will
take on the voice in the message on the back of the card or the voice of the recipient,
or perhaps even seek out the voice of someone mentioned in the message.
In another private photo card, a woman sits beside a female friend in a 1906 Mitchell
automobile and she has written a poem beneath the image: "No chord of music has
yet been found/ to even equal that sweet sound/ which to my mind all else
surpasses/ an auto engine and its puffing gasses." She added, writing to the friend
who sat beside her, "Don't this recall many pleasant rides over the beautiful Drive
Way?" The town she wrote from was Quanah, Texas, named after a Comanche chief,
Quanah Parker, who was the last to bring his people into the reservation in the Texas
Staked Plains and who later became a successful businessman, a hunting companion
to Theodore Roosevelt, and the deputy sheriff of Lawton, Oklahoma.
The story I have already written from this card chronicles the two women slipping off,
while their husbands are at a horse auction, and taking the automobile out for a spin
themselves, an assertion of independence which brings them face-to-face with the
town's namesake. This nation, built on the preservation of the rights of minorities,
has sometimes been slow to apply those rights fully. But this card captures an early
20th-century moment in the process of the further opening of American society. A
Texas town honors in its name a Native American chief who led a protracted struggle
against the very establishment of such a town but who then adapted successfully to
a new world. A woman delights with another woman in the technology of a maledominated society perhaps sensing that this very technology would one day help
transform that society into something even more egalitarian.
An image of the building that held the U.S. War, State, and Navy Departments in
Washington, D.C., bears this message: "For my darling Jojo: As a memento of the
pleasant hour spent standing in front of the U. S. War, State, & Navy Department
(on a chilly day) waiting for the procession to move up to the White House where we
shook hands with President Roosevelt, New Year's Day 1908. From her own baby
Deedee." This card, like many of those that contain the most personal of messages,
has no stamp. It had been placed inside an envelope for mailing to preserve its
privacy. Two women, quietly connected in an unconventional way, nevertheless were
proud to wait to exercise their rights to shake the hand of the President of the United
States.
On the Fourth of July in 1906 an anonymous young man sent an image of the Saco
River flowing through the White Mountains of New Hampshire to a man in Shelburne
Falls, Massachusetts, perhaps his father. The postmark indicates that the young man
was staying at one of the grand resort hotels of the White Mountains, the Crawford
House. "This is a quiet 4th," he wrote. "There are 220 in the house. When the flag
was raised this morning they gathered on the piazza and took off their hats and gave
three cheers. Going to pitch tomorrow." The card is very moving to me in its
understatement. Nearly a hundred years ago everyone in this great old hotel came
out into the yard, mostly strangers to each other, and cheered their devotion to an
America that so closely bound them together. Then the next day our young man
went off and participated in that very American game, baseball, united yet again with
others, this time in play.
Still another private photo was clearly taken on the entrenched front lines in World
War I, with tree trunks stacked against the deeply dug dirt walls and the fleeting
image of a doughboy up above, moving away. Standing on the dirt floor of the
excavated position is a stout, matronly woman in a dark gabardine dress and a
narrow-brimmed hat with her pocket watch pinned to her chest on a chain and with
a faint, thin-mouthed, you-better-be-taking-care-of-yourself smile. The handwritten
caption simply says, "Mother in the trenches." This very American mother has come
to the front lines to check on her son.
A mass-produced card shows an artist's image of a woman looking forlorn. The
card's printed sentiment says: heartbroken. On the message side, someone has
written these simple words to a man in Attleboro, Massachusetts, with no salutation
and no signature: "We'll meet in death." This at first sounds like a bitter break-up of
two lovers. But a closer examination of the man's address shows that he is in a
sanitarium. He is dying of tuberculosis. The relationship drastically shifts in one's
imagination and becomes complex indeed -- particularly with the absence of any
words of endearment or even identity in the message. In an age when so many
diseases readily turned fatal, a woman has stripped down her words to the essence
of belief that she shared with the dying man she loved.
There is something in this woman's faith and pragmatism and courage that seem
particularly American to me. As do the Texas woman's impassioned engagement with
technological progress and the Washington couple's pleasure in the openness of a
representative government and the young man's comradeship with his unknown
compatriots and the mother's strength and protectiveness and ability to abandon
convention for a higher goal. But, of course, all these qualities are universal, as well.
And it is important to understand how the particular and the universal are wedded in
art. A work of art does not come from the artist's mind. It does not come from the
rational, analytical faculties. It does not come from ideas. Art comes from the place
where the artist dreams. Art comes from the unconscious.
The unconscious is a scary place. The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa
once said, "To be an artist means never to avert your eyes." And if the artist truly
does that, if she goes into her unconscious, day after day, work after work, and does
not avert her eyes, she finally breaks through to a place where she is neither female
nor male, neither black nor white nor red nor yellow, neither Christian nor Muslim
nor Jew nor Hindu nor Buddhist nor atheist, neither North American nor South
American nor European nor African nor Asian. He is human. And if he happened by
birth or choice to call the United States of America home, he looks about him at the
particulars of this place and culture and finds those aspects of it that resonate into
the universal humanity we all share on this planet.
This past fall, I undertook a writing project using the Internet in order to teach this
basic tenet of the artistic process. My students had long heard me speak of the
origins of art being in the unconscious, and of the corollary that works of art are
fundamentally sensual objects that comprehend and articulate the world in nonanalytical ways. The paradox of teaching this art form, however, is that one
inevitably ends up using analytical discourse, as in these very sentences, to reject
analysis.
So on October 30, 2001, I began a Webcast under the auspices of the Web site of
Florida State University, where I teach. I would write a literary short story on the
Internet, for two hours each night, until it was done. Students could see the artistic
process directly, in its moment-to-moment fullness. I began with a simple concept,
and with no other preparation, I created the story in real-time. My viewers saw every
creative decision, down to the most delicate comma, as it was made on the page.
Every misbegotten, awkward sentence, every bad word choice, every conceptual
dead end was shared and worked over and revised and rewritten before the viewers'
eyes.
I waited until the morning of October 30 to open myself to an inspiration so that I
would not have a chance, even unconsciously, to pre-plan the story. I wanted the
whole process to be shared on the Webcast. So I went to my postcard collection on
that morning in search of the card that had the strongest story hovering about it.
And the one that leaped out at me held the image of Earl Sandt's biplane.
When I'd bought that card at a postcard convention the previous January, I'd known
that one day I would write a story inspired by it. I'd always assumed, however, that
the story would be in the voice of Earl Sandt, the doomed pilot. That changed on
October 30. I took up this antique postcard, and my artistic unconscious, my sense
of myself as an American, and my larger identity as a human being all powerfully
converged. Instantly I knew that I had to write the story in the voice of the man who
watched.
Because on September 11, 2001, we were all the ones who watched. From my
dreamspace I wrote this story about America of the early 20th century, and in doing
so I realized something crucial about that terrible day in America of the early 21st
century. The man who snapped the photo and wrote the postcard ninety years
earlier felt the same thing that we all did on September 11, and I came to
understand that the most profound and abiding effects of that day have very little to
do with international politics or worldwide terrorism or homeland security or our
unity as a nation. Those issues are real and important too, of course, but it seems to
me that the deepest experience of 9/11 happened for us one soul at a time in an
entirely personal way. We each of us viewed the fall of an aeroplane under stunning
circumstances for which we had no frame of reference, and as a result, the event got
around certain defenses that we all necessarily carry within us. And we confronted -one by one by one -- in a way most of us never have -- our own mortality.
Artists of all the nations of the world pass each day through the portal of the
personal unconscious and enter into the depths of the collective unconscious, and
these artists emerge with visions of the things that bind us all together. I am an
American. I am an artist. I look at my country and I seek the human soul.
Maps and Legends
by
Michael Chabon
The prolific literary output of
novelist and short-story writer
Michael Chabon recently
culminated with the publication of
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier
& Clay (Random House, 2000), an
ambitious novel charting the
adventures of two cousins who
arrive in New York in the 1930s and
get into the comic book business.
Kavalier & Clay won the 2001
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and
Chabon is currently pressing ahead
on a number of other major
projects and publications.
His published work includes The
Mysteries of Pittsburgh, a novel,
(1988) and Wonder Boys, a novel,
(1995) as well as two collections of
short stories, A Model World and
Other Stories, (1990) and
Werewolves In Their Youth (1999).
His writing has appeared in The
New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and
Playboy, and in a number of
anthologies, among them Prize
Stories 1999: The O'Henry Awards.
Much of his writing can also be
found on his ingenious Web site,
www.michaelchabon.com.
A graduate of the University of
Pittsburgh, Chabon subsequently
enrolled in the master of fine arts
writing program at the University of
California, Irvine. Chabon submitted
In 1969, when I was six years old, my parents took
out a Veterans Administration loan and bought a threebedroom house in an imaginary city called Columbia. As
a pediatrician for the Public Health Service, my
Brooklyn-born father was a veteran, of all things, of the
United States Coast Guard (which had stationed him,
no doubt wisely, in the coast-free state of Arizona).
Ours was the first V.A. housing loan to be granted in
Columbia, Maryland, and the event made the front page
of the local paper.
Columbia is now the second-largest city in the state, I
am told, but at the time we moved there, it was home
to no more than a few thousand people -- "pioneers,"
they called themselves. They were colonists of a dream,
immigrants to a new land that as yet existed mostly on
paper. More than four-fifths of Columbia's projected
houses, office buildings, parks, pools, bike paths,
elementary schools, and shopping centers had yet to be
built; and the millennium of racial and economic
harmony that Columbia promised to birth in its
theoretical streets and cul-de-sacs was as far from
parturition as ever. In the end, for all its promise and
ambition, Columbia may have changed nothing but one
little kid. Yet I believe that my parents' decision to
move us into the midst of that unfinished, ongoing act
of architectural and social imagination, altered the
course of my life and made me into the writer that I am.
In the mid-1960s, a wealthy, stubborn, and pragmatic
the manuscript of a novel as his
MFA thesis, and it was soon
published in 1988, as The Mysteries
of Pittsburgh, when Chabon was in
his 20s. The New Yorker called
Mysteries "a nearly perfect example
of the promising first novel," and
other reviewers compared Chabon
to such worthies as F. Scott
Fitzgerald and J.D. Salinger. His
next novel, Wonder Boys, was a
bestseller, and became a movie
starring Michael Douglas.
Chabon's essay "Maps and
Legends," in this volume, stems
from the circumstance of being born
in 1964 in Columbia, Maryland, one
of the very few planned towns in
the United States. His luxuriant
imagination, Chabon has avowed,
stems in part from his high level of
exposure to comic books in
childhood, which were brought to
him by his father. His father's
father, in turn, was a printer who
printed many comic books and
brought them to his son. Echoing
many critics, Saul Austerlitz writes
on the "Central Booking" Web site,
"Michael Chabon is one of the most
enjoyable, in addition to being one
of the most acclaimed, writers to
emerge in American fiction in the
past decade?. He also avoids many
of the games of his postmodern
peers, preferring instead the simple,
old-fashioned virtue of a story welltold. His books leave readers with
the recollection of powerful, wellshaped characters and a gift for
sharply pointed dialogue."
Chabon lives in Berkeley,
California, with his wife, Ayelet
Waldman, and their children.
dreamer named James Rouse had, by stealth and acuity, acquired an enormous
chunk of Maryland tobacco country lying along either side of the old Columbia Pike,
between Baltimore and Washington. Rouse, often referred to as the inventor of the
shopping mall (though there are competing claims to this distinction), was a man
with grand ideas about the pernicious nature of the suburb, and the enduring
importance of cities in human life. The City was a discredited idea in those days,
burnt and poisoned and abandoned to rot, but James Rouse felt strongly that it could
be reimagined, rebuilt, renewed.
He assembled a team of bright men -- one of countless such teams of bright men in
narrow neckties and short haircuts whose terrible optimism made the '60s such an
admirable and disappointing time. These men, rolling up their sleeves, called
themselves the Working Group. Like their patron, they were filled with sound and
visionary ideas about zoning, green space, accessibility, and the public life of cities,
as well as with enlightened notions of race, class, education, architecture, capitalism,
and transit. Fate, fortune, and the headstrong inspiration of a theorist with very deep
pockets had given them the opportunity to experiment on an enormous scale, and
they seized it. Within a relatively short time, they had come up with the Plan.
My earliest memories of Columbia are of the Plan. It was not merely the founding
document and chief selling point of the Columbia Experiment. It was also the new
town's most treasured possession, the tangible evidence of the goodness of Mr.
Rouse's inspiration. The Plan, in both particulars and spirit, was on display for all to
see, in a little building (one of Frank Gehry's first built works) called the Exhibit
Center, down at the shore of the manmade lake that lay at the heart of both plan
and town. This lake -- it was called, with the studied, historicist whimsy that
contributed so much authentic utopian atmosphere to the town, Lake Kittamaqundi - was tidy and still, rippled by the shining wakes of ducks. Beside it stood a modest
high-rise, white and modernistic in good late-'60s Star Trek style, called the
American City Building. Between this, Columbia's lone "skyscraper," and the Exhibit
Center, stretched a landscaped open plaza, lined with benches and shrubbery,
immaculate, and ornamented by a curious piece of sculpture called the People Tree,
a tall dandelion of metal, whose gilded tufts were the stylized figures of human
beings. Sculpture, benches, plaza, lake, tower: On a sunny afternoon in 1970 these
things had an ideal aspect; they retained the unsullied, infinite perspective of the
architect's drawings from which they had so recently sprung.
My parents, my younger brother, and I were shown those drawings, and many more,
inside the Exhibit Center. There were projections and charts and explanatory
diagrams. The famous Covenant -- the common agreement of all Columbia's citizens
and developers to abide by certain rather strict aesthetic guidelines in constructing
and altering their homes -- was explained. And there was a slide show, conducted in
one of those long-vanished 1970s rooms, furnished only with carpeted cubes and
painted the colors of a bag of candy corn. The slide show featured smiling children at
play, families strolling along wooded paths, couples working their way in paddleboats
across Kittamaqundi or its artificial sister, Wilde Lake. It was a bright, primarycolored world, but the children in it were assiduously black and white. Because that
was an integral part of the Columbia idea: that here, in these fields where slaves had
once picked tobacco, the noble and extravagant promises that had just been made
to black people in the flush of the Civil Rights movement would, at last, be redeemed.
That was, I intuited, part of the meaning of the symbol that was reproduced
everywhere around us in the Exhibit Center: that we were all branches of the same
family; that we shared common roots and aspirations.
Sitting atop a cube, watching the slide show, I was very much taken with the idea -the Idea -- of Columbia, but it was as we were leaving the Exhibit Center that my
fate was sealed: as we walked out, I was handed a map -- a large, fold-out map,
detailed and colorful, of the Working Group's dream.
The power of maps to fire the imagination is well known. And, as Joseph Conrad's
Marlow observed, there is no map so seductive as the one, like the flag-colored
schoolroom map of Africa that doomed him to his forlorn quest, marked by doubts
and conjectures, by the romantic blank of unexplored territory. The map of Columbia
I took home from that first visit was like that. The Plan dictated that the Town be
divided into sub-units to be called Villages, each Village in turn divided into
Neighborhoods. These Villages had all been laid out and named, and were present on
and defined by the map. Many of the Neighborhoods, too, had been drawn in, along
with streets and the network of bicycle paths that knit the town together. But there
were large areas of the map that, apart from the Village name, were entirely empty,
conjectural -- nonexistent, in fact.
The names of Columbia! That many, if not most of them, were bizarre, unlikely, and
even occasionally ridiculous, was a regular subject of discussion among Columbians
and outsiders alike. In the Neighborhood called Phelps Luck, you could find streets
with names that were anglo-whimsical and alliterative (Drystraw Drive, Margrave
Mews, Luckpenny Lane); elliptical and puzzling, shorn of their suffixes, Zen (Blue
Pool, Red Lake, Spiral Cut); or truly odd (Cloudleap Court, Roll Right Court,
Newgrange Garth). It was rumored that the naming of Columbia's one thousand
streets had been done by a single harried employee of the Rouse Company who,
barred by some kind of arcane agreement from duplicating any of the street names
in use in the surrounding counties of Baltimore and Anne Arundel, had turned in
desperation from the exhausted lodes of flowers, trees, and U.S. presidents to the
works of American writers and poets. The genius loci of Phelps Luck -- did you guess?
-- was Robinson Jeffers.
I spent hours poring over that map, long before my family ever moved into the
house that we eventually bought, with that V.A. loan, at 5179 Eliots Oak Road, in the
neighborhood of Longfellow, in the Village of Harper's Choice. To me the remarkable
thing about those names was not their oddity but the simple fact that most of them
referred to locations that did not exist. They were like magic spells, each one
calibrated to call into being one particular stretch of blacktop, sidewalk, and lawn,
and no other. In time -- I witnessed it with my own eyes, month by month, year by
year -- the street demanded by the formula "Darkbush Terrace" or "Night Roost"
would churn up out of the Maryland mud and clay, begin to sprout houses, trees, a
tidy blue-and-white identifying sign. It was a powerful demonstration to me of the
incantatory power of names and naming.
Eventually I tacked the map, considerably tattered and worn, to the wall of my room,
on the second floor of our three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath pseudo-colonial tract
house on Eliots Oak Road. In time the original map was joined, there, by a map of
Walt Disney World's new Magic Kingdom, and by another of a world of my own
devising, a world of horses and tall grass which I called Davoria. I studied the map of
Columbia in the morning as I dressed for school (a school without classrooms, in
which we were taught, both by racially diverse teachers and by the experience of
simply looking around at the other faces in the room, that the battle for integration
and civil rights was over, and that the good guys had won). I glanced up at the map
at night as I lay in bed, reading The Hobbit or The Book of Three or a novel set in Oz.
And sometimes I would give it a once over before I set out with my black and white
friends for a foray into the hinterlands, to the borders of our town and our
imaginations.
Our Neighborhood of Longfellow was relatively complete, with fresh-rolled sod lawns
and spindly little foal-legged trees, but just beyond its edges my friends and I could
ride our bikes clear off the edge of the Known World, into that unexplored blank of
bulldozed clay and ribboned stakes where, one day, houses and lives would blossom.
We would climb down the lattices of rebar into newly dug basements, dank and
clammy and furred with ends of tree roots. We rolled giant spools of telephone cable
down earthen mounds, and collected like arrowheads bent nails and spent missile
shells of grout. The skeletons of houses, their nervous systems, their subcutaneous
layers of insulation, were revealed to us as we watched them growing from the
inside out. Later I might come to know the house's eventual occupants, and visit
them, and stand in their kitchen thinking, I saw your house being born.
In a sense, the ongoing work of my hometown and the business of my childhood
coincided perfectly; for as my family subsequently moved to the even newer, rawer
Village of Long Reach, and then proceeded to fall very rapidly apart, Columbia and I
both struggled to fill in the empty places, to feel our way outward into the
mysterious gaps and undiscovered corners of the world. In the course of my years in
Columbia, I encountered things not called for by the members of the Working Group,
things that were not on the map. There were strange, uncharted territories of race
and sex and nagging human unhappiness. And there was the vast, unsuspected
cataclysm of my parents' divorce, that redrew so many boundaries, and created,
with the proverbial stroke of the pen, vast new areas of confusion and dismay. And
then one day I left Columbia, and discovered the bitter truth about race relations,
and for a while I was inclined to view the lessons I had been taught with a certain
amount of rueful anger. I felt that I had been lied to, that the map I had been
handed was a forgery. And after all, I would hear it said from time to time, Columbia
had failed in its grand experiment. It had become a garden-variety suburb in the
Baltimore-Washington Corridor; there was crime there, and racial unrest.
The judgments of Columbia's critics may or may not be accurate, but it seems to me,
looking back at the city of my and James Rouse's dreams from 30 years on, that just
because you have stopped believing in something you once were promised does not
mean that the promise itself was a lie. Childhood, at its best, is a perpetual
adventure, in the truest sense of that overtaxed word: a setting forth into trackless
lands that might have come to existence the instant before you first laid eyes on
them. How fortunate I was to be handed, at such an early age, a map to steer by,
however provisional, a map furthermore ornamented with a complex nomenclature
of allusions drawn from the poems, novels and stories of mysterious men named
Faulkner, Hemingway, Frost, Hawthorne, and Fitzgerald! Those names, that
adventure, are with me still, every time I sit down at the keyboard to sail off,
clutching some dubious map or other, into terra incognita.
Originally published in Architectural Digest
?2001 Michael Chabon
What's American About American Poetry?
by
Billy Collins
Billy Collins is the author of six
books of poetry, including Sailing
Alone Around the Room (Random
House, 2001); Picnic, Lightning
(University of Pittsburgh Press,
1998), which won the Paterson
Prize; The Art of Drowning
(University of Pittsburgh Press,
1995); The Apple That Astonished
Paris (University of Arkansas Press,
1988); and Questions About Angels
(William Morrow & Co., 1991),
which was selected by Edward
Hirsch for the National Poetry Series
Competition.
A new collection, Nine Horses,
will appear later this year. Collins'
poetry has appeared in anthologies,
textbooks, and a variety of
periodicals including Poetry, the
American Poetry Review, Harper's,
the Atlantic Monthly, the American
Scholar, the Paris Review and The
New Yorker.
He has received fellowships
from the New York Foundation for
the Arts, the National Endowment
for the Arts, and the John Simon
Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
He has also won the Bess Hokin
Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize, the
I never really considered myself a particularly
Oscar Blumenthal Prize, the Wood
American poet until I went to England some years ago
Prize, and the Levinson Prize -- all
to give a series of readings. I had put the tour together awarded by Poetry magazine.
Billy Collins received his B.A.
myself, and it looked it. The odd range of venues
from Holy Cross College and his
included a sixth form class, a jazz club in Brighton, a
Ph.D. from the University of
college of Sheffield University, and a community center California at Riverside. He is
Distinguished Professor of English at
in a small Yorkshire village. It was at this last site, by
Lehman College, City University of
the way, that an elderly, agrarian-looking man rose
New York; a visiting writer at Sarah
from the audience during a question-and-answer
Lawrence College; and an adjunct
professor at Columbia University.
session to ask: "Mr. Collins, are all your poems written
He was appointed United States
in prose?" But regardless of the audience or the venue, Poet Laureate for 2001-3. He lives
each reading left me with the same small but nagging
with his wife Diane, an architect, in
northern Westchester County, in
realization: that my poems were written not in English
New York state.
but in American. At every reading I could sense dead
spots occurring when I would utter a phrase such as
"eggs over easy" or "sweat the final." I became convinced that the mention of "a
state flower" in one of my poems must sound to the British ear like "estate flower." I
was discovering that idiomatic American is difficult to translate not only into French
or German, but into English. Just as one cannot understand what it is to be an
American until one leaves the country, I was not aware of my own American voice -my written accent, so to speak -- until I had faced several audiences of British
listeners.
I was especially surprised to discover how steeped many of my poems were in the
American idiom, because for years I had consciously avoided using fad dialects or
making references to contemporary culture. I knew that a phrase such as "frequent
flyer," "hatch-back," or "Jello shot" would in time make a poem sound dated and
thus could drastically shorten its shelf life. "Shelf life" is probably another example. I
had tried to favor a more universal vocabulary, not a purely elemental diction of
"rock," "cloud," "sky," and "tree," but a diction that leaned in that direction and was
reluctant to allow in the linguistic news of the day. Ezra Pound put it most succinctly
when he defined poetry as "the news that stays new." And I admired Mary Oliver's
advice regarding a poet's notion of an audience: "...write for a stranger born in a
distant country hundreds of years from now." I wanted to include that stranger of
the future in my audience, and I did not want him to have to consult a footnote for
"Wonder Bread" or "Big Mac."
America, of course, is greater than the sum of its idioms, but if you selected a few
poets from an international pool and asked them about the relationship of their
poetry to their nationality, most would place their mother tongue at the center of
their responses. Czeslaw Milosz might cite the expressive possibilities of Polish;
Yannis Ritsos might discuss the feel of writing in demotic Greek. But American poets
can claim no exclusive, nationalistic rights to a mother tongue, for the language they
write in is shared by the rest of the English-speaking world, which at this time is the
most rapidly expanding language community in the world.
So where does American-ness lie for a writer if not in his native tongue? D.H.
Lawrence opens his seminal Studies in Classic American Literature by putting that
question in the form of a challenge: "Where is this new bird called the true American?
Show us the homunculus of the new era. Go on, show us him. Because all that is
visible to the naked European eye, in America, is a sort of miscreant European." I
find it odd that Lawrence calls the European eye "naked," for, if anything, compared
to the bookish lenses covering the European eye, the American eye was the naked
one; and the first poet to look at America with that naked eye -- and, indeed, to
appear naked before us -- was Walt Whitman.
Lawrence recognized Whitman as the pioneer of a new American literature. He called
him "the greatest and the first and the only American teacher ... the first white
aboriginal" though in the same breath he mocks Whitman's universal gesturing and
accuses him of bogus sympathy. Surely, Whitman was the first poet to try to get his
arms around the continent so as to hold the lumberjack and the secretary and the
Eskimo in one loving cosmic embrace. A Long Islander and a New Yorker, he refused
to define himself as regional the way some American poets and ever more American
novelists have done ever since. But the true aboriginal stroke was Whitman's
breaking loose from the iambic collar of traditional English poetry. Leaves of Grass
moves to the cadence of the Bible, not the British iambic two-step. The long poem
was such a radical departure from customary meter and form that it triggered a
critical debate as to whether it was really poetry, a debate which should have ended
when one professor observed, "If this is not poetry, it is something greater than
poetry."
Strangely, it took a long time for anyone to follow Whitman's liberating lead. As
Lawrence put it, "Ahead of Whitman, nothing. Ahead of all poets, pioneering into the
wilderness of unopened life, Whitman." Eventually, American poetry caught up with
Whitman but not until his century had run out. By the early 1920s when Lawrence
was making his assessments, many of the now canonical modernist poems were
appearing, and whatever else defined their veerings away from convention, their
freedom from the box of the stanza and the harness of the iambic was the most
common evidence of their experimentations.
These days, of course, "free verse" is not the exciting license it once was; more often
than not, it is simply an excuse to produce untidy, flat-footed poems, an excuse in
no way limited to poets in America. The more powerful, more difficult, yet abiding
lesson of Whitman lies in his outrageousness. The audacity of lines like "It is time to
explain myself -- let us stand" and "I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of
the world" make possible Ginsberg's "American, I am putting my queer shoulder to
the wheel" and with some added coyness, Frank O'Hara's "ah lunch! I think I am
going crazy." Whitman's fearless, unheard-of voice shattered the glass of European
gentility and eventually emboldened later generations of American poets to speak
out in wilder tones.
If a writer is the sum of his or her influences, then my own poems are unavoidably
the result of my exposure to the sounds and styles of both British and American
poetry. I even find myself playing one diction off against another, usually for ironic
effect. But more specifically, in thinking about myself as an "American poet," and
thus committing the dangerous act of auto-literary criticism, I find that a number of
my poems seem determined to establish an American rootedness distinct from
European influence. "American Sonnet," for example, is a rejection of the Italian and
English sonnet models in favor of the American postcard which, like the sonnet,
limits expression to a confined space and, in addition, combines the verbal on one
side with the pictorial on the other. Like the traditional love sonnet, the traveler's
postcard has acquired its own ritualized conventions. The poem opens with an
uncharacteristic "we," as if I were speaking for all American poets.
AMERICAN SONNET
We do not speak like Petrarch or wear a hat like Spenser
and it is not fourteen lines
like furrows in a small, carefully plowed field
but the picture postcard, a poem on vacation,
that forces us to sing our songs in little rooms
or pour our sentiments into measuring cups.
We write on the back of a waterfall or lake,
adding to the view a caption as conventional
as an Elizabethan woman's heliocentric eyes.
We locate an adjective for weather.
We announce that we are having a wonderful time.
We express the wish that you were here
and hide the wish that we were where you are,
walking back from the mailbox, your head lowered
as you read and turn the thin message in your hands.
A slice of this faraway place, a width of white beach,
a piazza or carved spires of a cathedral
will pierce the familiar place where you remain,
and you will toss on the table this reversible display;
a few square inches of where we have strayed
and a compression of what we feel.
The ironic literary play of the first part of the poem gives way to a small drama of
separation, distance, and longing. The poem tries, but of course fails, to mix irony
and emotion with such equality as to achieve a perfectly ambiguous tone.
Another poem titled "Consolation" pretends to celebrate the pleasures of spending
the summer at home in the States rather than embarking on the traditional
European holiday. "How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy," the poem opens;
then goes on to express the ease of staying put on native soil, cruising "these local,
familiar streets,/ fully grasping the meaning of every road sign and billboard/and all
the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots." "Instead of slouching in a cafe
ignorant of the word for ice," the speaker prefers "the coffee shop and the waitress
known as Dot" where he will not have to have his photograph taken with the owner
or figure out the exchange rate when the bill arrives. For him, "It is enough to climb
back into the car/as if it were the great car of English itself/and sounding my loud
vernacular horn, speed off/ down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even
Bologna." The poem is a mock-rejection of literary Euro-centricism delivered by a
speaker whose modest tastes echo the sweet provincialism of the Wallace Shawn
character in the film My Dinner with Andre.
"Lines Written Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey," as the title implies,
provides another example of this process of "Americanization," as Wordworth's
famous autobiographical lyric is imported into the speaker's American, and again,
domestic, life.
I was here before, a long time ago,
and now I am here again
is an observation that occurs in poetry
as frequently as rain occurs in life.
The fellow may be gazing
over an English landscape,
hillsides dotted with sheep,
a row of tall trees topping the downs,
or he could be moping through the shadows
of a dark Bavarian forest,
a wedge of cheese and a volume of fairy tales
tucked into his rucksack.
But the feeling is always the same:
it was better the first time.
This time is not nearly as good.
I'm not feeling as chipper as I did back then.
Something is always missing -Swans, a glint on the surface of a lake,
some minor but essential touch.
Or the quality of things has diminished.
The sky was a deeper, more dimensional blue,
clouds were more cathedral-like,
and water rushed over rock
with greater effervescence.
From our chairs we have watched
the poor author in his waistcoat
as he recalls the dizzying icebergs of childhood
and mills around in a field of weeds.
We have heard the poets long dead
declaim their dying
from a promontory, a riverbank,
next to a haycock, within a shadowy copse.
We have listened to their dismay,
the kind that issues from poems
the way water issues forth from hoses,
the way the match always gives its little speech on fire.
And when we put down the book at last,
lean back, close our eyes,
stinging with print,
and slip in the bookmark of sleep,
we will be schooled enough to know
that when we wake up
a little before dinner
things will not be nearly as good as they once were.
Something will be missing
from this long, coffin-shaped room,
the walls and windows now
only two different shades of gray,
the glossy gardenia drooping
in its chipped terra-cotta pot.
And on the floor, shoes, socks,
the browning core of an apple.
Nothing will be as it was
a few hours ago, back in the glorious past
before our naps, back in that Golden Age
that drew to a close sometime shortly after lunch.
The revisionist speaker's disenchantment with the Romantic theme of loss is evident
in his lumping together all the complaining poets of the 19th century, both English
and German. The domestication of this pattern of loss begins with the homely
images of the garden hose and the match. Time is compressed from an
autobiographical span to a few hours between lunch and dinner, and the dated
landscape of "promontory," "haycock," and "copse" is compressed into an ordinary
room-scape with its drooping flower and strewing of shoes and socks. Romantic
agony is reduced to reader fatigue. The Golden Age lies irretrievably behind us in an
earlier part of the afternoon.
What makes poetry American can be measured in the kind of steps it makes away
from the poetry of the "Old World" as the schoolbooks used to say. Poetry can also
be American because of its idioms, its landscape, its irreverence toward the
European past, its audacious egotism, its ironic stances, its freedom of fixed
cadences, but most of all because of its immense variety. This last quality -- its
democratic expansiveness and inclusiveness -- was best expressed in a short poem
by Louis Simpson, who, for the moment, deserves to have the last word on the
subject.
AMERICAN POETRY
Whatever it is, it must have
A stomach that can digest
Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.
Like the shark, it contains a shoe.
It must swim for miles through the desert
Uttering cries that are almost human.
Note: "American Sonnet" and "Consolation" appear in Billy Collins's Sailing Alone Around the Room (Random
House, 2001). "American Poetry" is from At the End of the Open Road. Copyright ? 1963.
Reprinted by permission of Louis Simpson.
America's American
by
Robert Creeley
Veteran poet Robert Creeley has a
worldwide reputation, having been
recognized as a seminal American
poet for many decades. He has
published more than 60 volumes of
poetry, including Just in Time:
Poems 1984-1994 (New Directions,
2001), Selected Poems 1945-1990
(London and New York, 1991), and
many other volumes going back to
the 1950s. He has published a
novel, The Island (1963), and more
than a dozen books of other prose
and essays. He has edited the
poetic works of Charles Olson, and
collections of Robert Burns and Walt
Whitman. His work has appeared in
many magazines, including Poetry.
Honors include the Frost Medal,
the Shelley Memorial Award, as well
as grants and fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Arts,
the Rockefeller Foundation, and the
Guggenheim Foundation. Since
1989, he has been Samuel P. Capen
Professor of Poetry and Humanities
at the State University of New York,
Buffalo. He was elected a chancellor
of the Academy of American Poets
in 1999.
Born in Arlington,
Massachusetts, in 1926, Creeley, as
a boy, was awarded a scholarship to
a small private school in New
Hampshire, an event he feels
salvaged his formal education. He
entered Harvard University in 1943,
and worked for the American Field
Service in Burma and India in 1944
and 45. He began publishing poetry
in 1946. In the late '40s and early
'50s, he undertook correspondences
with William Carlos Williams, Ezra
Pound, and a lengthy exchange of
letters with the poet Charles Olson.
In 1954, he joined Olson at Black
Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand?
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim,
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, double dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung
Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.
-- Sir Walter Scott,
"Breathes There the Man"
Albeit an Englishman wrote that deathless poem, it was
nonetheless one who might well have claimed honorary
U.S. citizenship for fact of his having caught the
national sentiment so fairly. "We are the last first
people," the poet Charles Olson writes in his compactly
moving study of Herman Melville, Call Me Ishmael. It is
as if the United States were, in its sense of its own
reality, that place to which all others in the world hoped
to come because it argued so intently a chance for
renewal, for a fresh start far from all fact of contesting
history, all the old habits and values of the world thus
left. It is as much the dream of those of us who live
here, like they say, as of any aspiring immigrant. We all
believe in the future as that place we will always come
Mountain College, an experimental
arts college in North Carolina,
where he edited the Black Mountain
Review. Considered part of the
modernist school of literature
exemplified by Pound and Williams,
Creeley has been linked in tone and
technique to his contemporaries
Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen
Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Edward
Dorn, and other poets.
Creeley's life, as well as his
work, tends to express the
particularly American literary
"counterculture" that arose among
the intelligensia in the 1950s and
'60s. His childhood was marked by
the loss of his father before age 5;
undaunted, Creeley spent the rest
of his life indulging a vast curiosity
about other places and cultures.
Rather than settling down in a city
and pursuing a lucrative career,
Creeley preferred, at various times,
subsistence farming in New
Hampshire, publishing poetry in
Mallorca, teaching high school in
New Mexico, tutoring on a
Guatemalan plantation, teaching in
British Columbia, and practicing the
craft of writing in Bolinas,
California, among other journeys.
In its article on Creeley, the
Oxford Companion to Twentiethcentury Poetry in English writes:
"Creeley's poetry is predominantly
concerned with love and the
emotions attending intimate
relationships. Among his strongest
influences he lists not only poets
[including Allen] Ginsberg, who
reassured him that 'you can write
directly from that which you feel,'
but also jazz musicians, who
demonstrated that feelings could be
expressed no less powerfully for
eschewing prescribed forms."
back to.
Growing up as I did in the classic New England small town wherein my mother was
the town nurse (my father, a doctor, had died when I was four), I felt marginal in
many respects. First, we did not come from the town but, rather, had come to it
from what would be called now the Boston area. Though the distance to Boston was
only some 25 miles, it was an implacable space to manage culturally. Even Concord,
some eight miles distant, was far away from the habits and persons common to my
childhood. So being thought a person from the other world of greater Boston in the
small farming town where, in fact, my own real life was first significantly located
meant a good deal of confusion for all concerned. A few years ago I went back to see
my old cronies of that time on the occasion of our 50th high school reunion and there
we mostly all were, curiously "children" again in that the lives we had managed with
whatever means were now, by and large, over. We faced a new time once again -old age -- and we were as fledgling in its circumstance as we had been entering our
own first adulthood, with all the attendant, tentative paraphernalia of sex and
earning a living.
I left my hometown completely by chance in my 14th year. My sister had gone to
Northfield Seminary for her final year of high school and her close friend there had a
younger brother at Holderness, a small Episcopalian prep school in New Hampshire.
So my sister got the application forms, persuaded my mother to fill them out and
submit them, and finally I was given an admissions test, did well enough for a
scholarship, and off I went. Even now I can recall the searing homesickness I felt,
keeping my mother and sister's letters unopened till there might be chance to read
them and to cry sans witnesses. But the teaching proved extraordinarily apt and
whatever education I can be said to have I got there. Some was curious indeed -- as
'translating' parts of James Joyce's great collection of stories, Dubliners, into Basic
English. Much was classically solid -- the language study, for example, Latin and
German -- and much simply the useful acquisition of a basic ability to read and write,
to make clear, in William Carlos Williams' phrase, "what subsequently I saw and
what heard." Although college must have had some information for me, it was got
mostly from peers, the transforming impact of the Second World War and the first
defining love I had.
Despite I could hardly know it starting out, writing was to prove the one constant in
a life marked with endless shiftings of place and relationship. I married at 20. By 28
I was single again but then remarried within a year. Then separated again 20 years
later, then married again, and so continue to be. Is that an American habit, I wonder?
A few years ago Buckminster Fuller pointed out that a number of Americans
representing one-fifth of the country's population leave home each year. What else
might we say of ourselves? That we think we need know no language but English
(although in obvious fact we know many -- more languages are being spoken in New
York at this moment than anywhere else on earth!) -- that we need know nothing
about opera or poetry, and I am sure the list goes on -- and still we'll be completely
at home in our company. Is it an embarrassment to be discovered liking such things
or having such skills? That catch phrase, "a good read," comes with the same
inference as "a fun place" or "have a nice day." One never wants to take the arts,
any of them, too seriously.
Robert Graves wrote that poetry is that art for which no academy exists, meaning,
as I understood him, that there is no place one can go, so as to learn whatever the
practice of poetry might be. But Graves had a tradition of some real kind for his own
instruction and support. How different that "half-savage country, out of date," which
Ezra Pound was born into and which, it would seem, many American poets as myself
still choose as our condition, fearful that the far more secure model of English verse
might displace altogether the small imaginal place we can call home. My generation
was for years divided between those who followed T.S. Eliot's instance and so looked
to a classically developed poetry in the English tradition and those as myself who
doggedly followed Dr.Williams. When he was asked where it was he had got his
"diction," he answered curtly, "Out of the mouths of Polish mothers." We wanted,
much as Charles Olson puts it, "to leave the roots on." We wanted our writing to be
fact of our own social body, evidence of our own collective family person, our Polish,
Irish, Italian, German, Chinese, African, French, Russian mothers and fathers, uncles,
cousins, and neighbors. To gain an admission and use for that source of our ways of
speaking, our various rhetorics, was a long and often displacing battle. We didn't talk
right, as one says, we were vulgar. So we were the "raw" in contrast to the "cooked"
in Levi-Strauss' formula, and that was entirely our pleasure.
America, whatever it is, cannot be taken to be a single place. Yet I know I stay fixed
in New England in my own mind as much as if I had spent my whole life there,
perhaps even more so than one who has. It is my imago mundi, that picture of world
I carry with me as its imagination. Almost doggedly as I have moved from the east
to the west, north to south, traveling at times two to three thousand miles in each
direction several times a year, I have still stayed "home," in my mind at least, still
thought it must be snowing now in Boston or how pleasant it must be in Maine with
the fall leaves turning color. That's where I was, however changed it seemed all was
around me.
What otherwise might matter is still much as Whitman had it, that the country needs
to embrace its poets. "To have great poets, there must be great audiences too." But
that is remarkably simple to say but seemingly almost impossible to realize. Poets
are so very low in the ranking of public performers or those providing the body politic
with material of their interest and desire. If the sad events of September 11, 2001,
provoked a remarkable use of poems as a means wherewith to find a common and
heartfelt ground for sorrow, it passed quickly as the country regained its equilibrium,
turned to the conduct of an aggressive war, and, one has to recognize, went back to
making money. Is poetry of such little consequence in this country because it does
not "make money," can be hardly called a "profession" or even a sensible "vocation,"
seems most aptly undertaken by adolescents and older, emotional women? Does
poetry "tell" us anything of any relevance? What does it mean? All those questions
have clear and very simple answers -- but they will not be found here. Rather, one
wants it recognized that, in America, poetry prompts a response much as Marianne
Moore's ironic first line, "Poetry? I too dislike it." Another artist once said, "Poets are
like harmonica players. Terrific, but not much use for them."
So that's a sad condition to work in, like bad air, poor light, long hours. Who would
ever think to be a poet in this country if he did not feel literally that he had to be?
Someone told me of a fledgling doctor who, in the middle of his medical studies,
unexpectedly inherited a large sum of money from a recently dead aunt. So he quit
then and there, having, as he felt, no further reason to be a doctor. I knew another,
met in a bar by accident after he'd given me a place to sit down, who said he
couldn't stand the way people looked and smelled. He was repulsed. When I asked
him how he'd ever got through medical school without learning that fact of his
feelings, he said it was the training doctor he was paying attention to. He was
following that person's lead, doing what he or she determined, and the patient was
only present abstractly. In his own examining room, however, there was the
absolute patient, all real, all flesh and adamant bone.
If I am any instance, American poets will go to their respective graves still wondering
just what they are doing, and why they were doing it, and, if for anyone, for whom.
"Is that a real poem or did you just make it up yourself?" But there is probably
nothing one can so do that finds such remarkable response and affection, yet is
based, as Williams writes, "solely [on] air." American poets have a freedom rare
indeed in the common world. They can write what they want to in a manner almost
impossible to conceive of in other countries and cultures. So Pound, quoting Remy de
Gourmont, "Freely to write what he chooses is the writer's sole pleasure," makes
clear what our nationality has given us, at least in some sense. Not only can one
write in that useful sense of "freedom" despite its obvious limits, one can also take
words from a dazzling range of rhetorics -- high, low, professional, domestic -- with
all their consequent tones and emphases. In contrast, a German friend once pointed
out to me that Gunter Grass could not be understood by the very persons his brilliant
novels were a "voice" for, the common workers. The rhetorical base in his writing
was a "literary" German. The workers spoke a vernacular, which separated them
entirely. In England Wyndham Lewis wrote of being "branded on the tongue." Class,
education, and the ranks so defined made a very large difference to the possibilities
of the aspiring poet in his time, and so continue to without significant change.
Perhaps I most respect the intense localism that being from New England -- and
America -- has given me as a writer. Maybe the better phrase would be selfpreoccupation, which is at its best in that tour de force which Whitman creates in
"Song of Myself," so much and so revealingly a poem of this country. Or, in like
sense, it is the quiet way Emily Dickinson writes with her magnificent clarity of the
life we live daily in the minds and bodies we've been given. She grew up in Amherst,
Massachusetts, some 70 miles to the west of Acton, my hometown. Then there was
Henry Thoreau, who said of where he lived, "I have traveled much in Concord" -just down the road.
It's been the genius of this country to have made a lyric poetry of unique diversity
and power. There are poets in other countries, perhaps, who have equaled its
authority, but no community of poets has ever so written, with such a range and
distinction, as have those of my world. If one is one -- and in the U.S. one must be,
person or poet -- with all the attendant independence and individuality our culture so
insists upon despite the painful isolation it effects, then the lyric poem -- that poem
of singular, passing existence -- must also be his or her greatest resource. So I have
lived with its abiding masters all my life -- with Williams, with Dickinson, with Pound,
with Whitman, with Poe, with H.D., with Stevens, with Louis Zukofsky, with Charles
Olson, with Robert Duncan, with Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Edward Dorn. The
list goes on and on. Whether or not so intending, it was America gave me these
enduring friends of my heart and mind. It was here we all lived.
On Being an American Historian
by
David Herbert Donald
David Herbert Donald is Charles
Warren Professor of American
History and Professor of American
Civilization Emeritus at Harvard
University.
A native of Mississippi, David
Herbert Donald has spent most of
his life writing and teaching about
the American Civil War era. He has
been a professor at Columbia
University, Princeton University,
Oxford University, and the Johns
Hopkins University, in addition to
Harvard. He has twice won the
Pulitzer Prize in biography, for
Charles Sumner and the Coming of
the Civil War (1960) and Look
Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe
(1987), but he is perhaps best
known for his Lincoln (1995), a
biography which appeared on the
best-seller list of the New York
Times for 14 weeks.
Among his other books are
Lincoln's Herndon (1948; revised
edition, 1989); Divided We Fought:
A Pictorial History of the War, 18611865 (1952); Inside Lincoln's
Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of
Salmon P. Chase (1954); Lincoln
Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil
War Era (2001); The Civil War and
Reconstruction [with Jean Harvey
Baker and Michael F. Holt] (2000);
When I was completing my biography of Abraham
Lincoln, my literary agent approached several British
publishers with a view of issuing an English edition of
the book. None expressed much interest. Finally one of
the famous old London houses agreed to take on the
book, but with a notable lack of enthusiasm. I should
not expect much in the way of sales in the British Isles,
the editor-in-chief wrote me. He warned that in England
a book on Abraham Lincoln would probably sell about
as many copies as a life of Lord Shaftesbury would sell
in the United States.
I was furious. After all, the book that I had written was
not about some worthy but obscure 19th-century
American figure, like Thomas Hart Benton or Benjamin
Harrison. It was about Abraham Lincoln, arguably the
greatest American President. In leading the North to
victory in the Civil War, in abolishing slavery, and in
preserving peace with the European powers during that
conflict, he became a figure not merely of national but
of international importance, admired by men as varied
as Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King, Jr.. Leo
Tolstoy called him "a Christ in miniature, a saint of
The Politics of Reconstruction,
1863-1867 (1965); Charles Sumner
and the Rights of Man (1970); and
Lincoln at Home (1999).
Mr. Donald was born in
Goodman, Mississippi, on October
1, 1920, the son of Ira Unger
Donald, a cotton planter, and Sue
Ella (Belford) Donald, a former
schoolteacher. After attending local
schools, he went to Holmes Junior
College in the same town. Then he
attended Millsaps College, in
Jackson, Mississippi, from which he
graduated with the highest honors
in 1941. He received his graduate
training in history and sociology
from the University of North
Carolina and the University of
Illinois, which awarded him the M.A.
degree in 1942 and the Ph.D.
degree in 1945. At the University of
Illinois, he was research assistant to
the great Lincoln scholar, J.G.
Randall. After a series of teaching
appointments, he came to Harvard
University, where he taught until his
retirement in 1991.
Married to Dr. Aida DiPace
Donald, the recently retired editorin-chief of Harvard University Press,
Donald resides in Lincoln,
Massachusetts.
humanity."
After brooding over my insult for several weeks, I grudgingly Conceded -- though
only to myself -- that my snobbish London editor did have a point -- one which,
unhappily, the miserable sales of the book in England reinforced. The problem with
interesting a large foreign audience in a book on Lincoln was not, as the editor had
thought, so much the subject as the presuppositions I had made in writing it.
Addressing primarily an American audience, I had tacitly assumed some
acquaintance with important events in U.S. history, like the Missouri Compromise
and the Dred Scott decision, or at least a willingness to explore the intricacies of
such issues as the Emancipation Proclamation or the Thirteenth Amendment. These
expectations proved unrealistic.
I thought I had written about these matters as a historian, one who belonged to an
international fraternity, which held a common set of assumptions and practiced much
the same techniques, just as scientists of all nations do. I discovered instead that I
was writing as an American historian. Indeed, I have concluded that all my books
have shared this same trait: They are American books, written by an American
historian.
It is not easy to define exactly what makes my writings distinctively American. The
most obvious way is to point out that, with hardly an exception, they are about
American subjects: the struggle between nationalism and sectionalism in 19thcentury America; the American Civil War; the process of Reconstruction after that
war. And all of my biographies have been about Americans, some of whom have had
reputations so local that it is hard to think that they could interest any except
American readers. William H. Herndon, Abraham Lincoln's colorful law partner and
one of his earliest biographers, was a minor figure. Salmon P. Chase had only limited
fame as an antislavery Ohio politician until he became Abraham Lincoln's Secretary
of the Treasury. Charles Francis Adams had perhaps a larger reputation as U. S.
minister to Great Britain during the Civil War, but even he is remembered, if at all,
as the son and the grandson of American Presidents. Charles Sumner, the powerful
Massachusetts abolitionist Senator, longed to resemble a British aristocrat, but few
Englishmen today could be expected even to recognize his name.
Still, the choice of a subject does not necessarily reveal a historian's nationality.
After all, one of the best early biographies of Abraham Lincoln, which still has value,
was written by an Englishman, Lord Charnwood. And Basil Liddell Hart, Colin Ballard,
and G. F. R. Henderson -- all Englishmen -- have written some of the best military
studies on the American Civil War. A massive work by an Italian historian, Raimondo
Luraghi, is one of the best general histories of the Civil War.
Perhaps my use of language is a better indication that I not merely write about
American subjects but that I am myself an American. I hope that I mostly use
standard English -- but when the occasion arises I delight in distinctively American
words and phrases. For instance, Lincoln in one of his messages to Congress spoke
of secession as "rebellion sugar-coated" and said that in a certain engagement
Confederate troops "turned tail and ran." Senator Sumner scolded him for debasing
the English language -- but I quoted his lapses with great pleasure. I also take
delight in some American neologisms. When Herndon wrote of Lincoln's complicated
courtship of Mary Todd and of their off-and-on-again plans for a wedding, he headed
his chapter "The Marriage Embrigglement." I have always thought that a better, and
more distinctively American, word than "imbroglio," and I used it repeatedly.
Similarly, whenever I can, I like to quote the vernacular language of uneducated
Americans, which often has a force and a clarity that would be lost if they followed
the rules of English grammar. I find something direct and compelling in a statement
like that of Dennis Hanks, Lincoln's country cousin, who instructed Herndon on what
to include in his Lincoln biography: "Now William Be Sure and have My Name very
Conspikus and the work will gaw [i.e., go] of well."
II
In yet another way my American upbringing has affected the way I write history. An
impartial observer, given the unenviable task of reappraising my long list of
publications, which stretch from the 1940s to the present, might reasonably conclude
that there has been no clear, coherent pattern in my books. In my early days as a
historian, I was fascinated by the possibility of linking my discipline to sociology, and
in a series of essays, published as Lincoln Reconsidered, tried to analyze the social
origins of 19th-century American reform movements and of the Southern defense of
slavery. Then I became deeply interested in psychology, and especially
psychoanalysis, with the result that my biography of Charles Sumner became what
one reviewer called the most completely Freudian biography he had ever read. About
this time, though, I was attracted to new developments in quantitative history, and
in The Politics of Reconstruction attempted to chart that period in a sequence of
graphs. After this, I began reading literary criticism and wrote my biography of
Thomas Wolfe, the 20th-century Southern novelist. Some of my colleagues have
found these repeated shifts in subject matter and methodology confusing and even
disturbing. My dear old friend, Arthur S. Link, who spent his entire distinguished
scholarly career retracing the career of Woodrow Wilson, once chided me for
frivolously changing my point of view. "David," he gently scolded, "your problem is
that you are not a serious historian."
To this charge I must, to some extent plead guilty, because I have written about
whatever interested me, using whatever tools came to hand, and I have written what
I enjoyed writing, not what I -- or anybody else -- thought ought to be written. That,
I think, is a distinctively American attitude. In my case it stemmed from my
experiences on a prolonged bus trip, made during my years as a graduate student.
Starting on the East Coast, I rolled and jostled along for hour after hour, day after
day, as the bus took me and my fellow passengers across the Appalachian Mountains,
through the industrial cities of the Middle West, across the interminable Great Plains,
into the fantastically beautiful mountain country, until at last we arrived in California.
From that adventure I date my love affair with the American landscape, in all its
variety, The long trip forced me to understand the enormous expanse of our country
and, in my meetings day after day with my fellow travelers of all races and both
sexes, from all parts of the country, I came to recognize the infinite diversity of
American life.
That diversity has extended to me -- as, of course, it has to so many other American
writers -- enormous room for experimentation, in subject matter, in theme, and in
method. There is no single dominant historiographical tradition; there is no one route
that all aspiring historians need to follow. The very diversity of my writing is the best
indication of how being an American has affected my career as a historian.
III
Yet within that diversity there is, I think, a hidden unity, which is also distinctively
American -- or, at least, distinctive to the Southern United States, where I was born
and raised. Whatever my method or subject matter -- whether I am attempting a
quantitative study of the Reconstruction Congress or a literary deconstruction of the
novels of Thomas Wolfe -- I have always attempted to tell a story that readers would
find absorbing, with actors that they would think believable.
This tradition of story-telling has always been strong in the South. Nearly every
family in my native Mississippi had its story-tellers -- its archivists, so to speak, of
family memories and legends. Often, these were elderly women, whose recollections
seemed to stretch back to almost the beginning of time. They knew all the family
stories: how great-great grandfather had brought his wife and three children across
the Appalachian Mountains into the Mississippi Valley, barely escaping marauding
Indians; how great-grandfather had enlisted in the Confederate Army and had fought
until he was wounded at the battle of Chickamauga; how grandfather had shocked
the family by marrying a Yankee -- so called because she was born north of the
Mason-Dixon line. As I was growing up, I listened to the epics the narrators recited,
recounting -- in minute detail and always in the same words -- precisely what each
figure in the story had worn, had said, and had done.
These early, unrecognized practitioners of oral history were story-tellers who related
their tales with enormous flair and great gusto. They did not simply list facts; they
constructed their stories with artistry, leading always to a dramatic climax. It was
this powerful oral tradition that underlay so much of the best of modern Southern
literature. It provided the basic structure for William Faulkner's greatest novels. And
it was this same tradition that gives verisimilitude to Eudora Welty's best short
stories.
Inevitably this tradition affected my own approach toward history -- as it has
affected so many of the best historians of the South. Though I was trained in the
best "scientific" methods of historical research, taught to deal with vast impersonal
forces like "class," "caste," "capitalism," "feudalism," and the like, I found that when
I actually sat down to write, my mind slipped into the old patterns of narration, of
making readers see and understand real-life figures in the past.
Even in the mechanics of writing I find myself influenced by this distinctively
American -- perhaps Southern American -- way of telling a story. I compose at the
keyboard of my computer, pausing as I complete each sentence to read it aloud,
making sure that both the sound and the sense convey the meaning that I want. If I
have failed, I delete the offending sentence and start again. Sometimes I may sound
out a dozen versions of a phrase or sentence before I get it just right. Occasionally
this practice has led to amusing results. Once, when I was in my study writing my
biography of Thomas Wolfe, two friendly carpenters were making repairs in an
adjacent room. Presently they took a coffee-break in the back yard, just out of my
sight but not quite out of my hearing.
Asked the older carpenter in a worried tone: "Do you think he's all right?"
"I guess so," replied the younger, "but he does sit at that machine for hours and
hours talking to himself."
I may not be "all right" -- but I like to think that my story-telling carries on a great
tradition. And it is a distinctively American tradition.
How Does Being an American Inform What I Write?
by
Richard Ford
Of course, it's a tail-chasing question to begin with, a
literary chicken-or-egg riddle. You have only to raise
the stakes sublimely to see what I mean: How did
being Russian influence Chekhov? How did being a
woman affect Virginia Woolf? How did being a pint-sized
sailor determine the public pronouncements of Popeye,
who finally knew the answer and said it best: "I am
what I am. That's all that I am."
To break this logic I have to dream up an answer, not
find one that's already there. This is generally the
novelist's assignment: to go beyond the obvious toward
the new, create a fresh awareness, add to the sum of
available reality, crack open the frozen sea within us -however you imagine the new to be achieved.
Two preliminary matters need disposing of right away,
both pertaining to matters un-American. In reply to the
question posed by the title How does being an
American inform what I write?
-- one might want to say: "Well, being an American
means I felt free to write whatever I chose, and so I did.
Q.E.D." But, couldn't I have done as much in Denmark,
Canada or Britain, and been one of theirs? It's true of
the U.S., but it's not uniquely true. And second, while
being an American may have made me a writer and
stamped my efforts indelibly, it hasn't necessarily made
Richard Ford was born in Jackson,
Mississippi, in 1944, and was raised
there and in Little Rock, Arkansas.
He attended public schools,
Michigan State University, The
University of California, and
Washington University Law School.
He is the author of five novels,
including The Sportswriter, Wildlife,
and Independence Day, and three
books of stories, including Rock
Springs and A Multitude of Sins. He
has written many essays, and is a
frequent contributor to The New
Yorker magazine and to the New
York Times.
Mr. Ford's work has been
honored with the Award for Merit in
the Novel of the American Academy
of Arts and Letters, of which he is a
member. His work has, as well,
received The Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction, The PEN/Faulkner Award for
Fiction, and The PEN/Malamud
Award for Excellence in the Short
Story. His novels and stories have
been translated into 23 languages.
From France, he received the Ordre
des Artes et des Lettres. He is
married to Kristina Ford and lives in
New Orleans.
me a better writer than some other country's. A look into world literature tells us
that. For all I know, I might've been better as a Frenchman.
I don't remember when I first realized I was an American. Pledging allegiance to the
flag at age six. Registering for the Selective Service at eighteen. Joining the Marines
at twenty. I'm certain, though, that long before any of these happened I was made
quite aware that I was first, a Mississippian -- a Jacksonian in fact -- a southerner, a
son of parents who were not themselves Mississippians, but Arkansans, and so
slightly different from me. All these unique local identities, of course, presume me to
be an American, since the Republic, the country and principles it embodies contain
all the others. Thus, anything about me and my productions that I might attribute to
being a southerner, etc., can also be attributable -- by radiating logic -- to being an
American.
But when I was growing up in Mississippi, in the 1940s and '50s, the mood
pertaining to the South's allegiance to the larger American nation was noticeably
equivocal. The Depression and World War II were not long past. A cousin I knew was
at Pearl Harbor (my family talked about it at dinner). The Korean War was under way.
Communism was perceived as a threat to what most southerners felt was our
national security, if not in fact our entire identity. My parents voted. Roosevelt and
Truman were our Presidents. I pledged allegiance. America was ours, and we
belonged to it -- at least for the purposes of preserving and defending it.
And yet, where other, important socio-political issues were concerned -- particularly
race, voting rights, equal opportunity, free access to the American bounty, and that
quaintly-American constitutional cornerstone called Federalism, known regionally as
"states' rights" -- one felt that many in the South might've preferred to be attached
to another mother country entirely: South Africa or Paraguay for many whites;
France or Sweden if one were black. From any side of these life-bending issues,
being an American, believing in the nation's expressed goals of life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness, became tumultuous, disharmonious, debatable and occasionally
dangerous to one's health.
Self-consciously acknowledging one's national identity and speaking it to oneself is,
obviously, only one manifestation of having an identity. Indeed, much about our
identity we Americans traditionally prefer to take for granted, in order to concentrate
more intensely on the fruits of belonging. It's an implicit aim of our republican form
of government that citizens not be so preoccupied with the mechanics and
philosophy of citizenship, but rather that we concern ourselves with acting -- even if
blithely -- as citizens. National identity is, thus, a means to the end of individual
freedom, not an end to itself.
But for me, in Mississippi, in the South, in my formative years between 1950 and
1962, being an American and assuming my national identity, meant being preoccupyingly (not at all blithely) immersed in an impassioned, publicly argued, and
quite grave welter of sentiments and competing ideas about American citizenship.
The heart of this debate was: How do I reconcile belonging in this country of my
birth when this country seems bent on oppressing what I believe are my most
fundamental and necessarily unalienable individual rights? To white segregationists,
this supposed right was the one that entitled them to segregate those different from
themselves away from themselves; whereas to blacks and integrationist whites the
opposing right was the one that freed them to move wherever and associate
however they pleased without fear of harm when they did so. In this commotion and
in the disputation surrounding it -- a long disputation called the American Civil Rights
Movement -- many people lost their lives in order that justice and right should
prevail, which it did, if not perfectly.
I've never felt comfortable judging any attitude, persona, behavior, character quality,
experience or belief to be "typically American." When I'm in another country and
someone who reads my books asks me if a story I've written is typically American, I
demur. And then I say: Think of flying over an American suburb in a helicopter, and
seeing a man in a pork-pie hat out mowing his lawn. Surely, this would be the typical
American. Who is he? (We might think we know.) But, when we come for a closer
look, gently lift the hat off the man's head, we discover he's a Pakistani, an
immigrant, or a third- generation Ghanian or Chinese-American. And the route that
has brought him to his lawn, in this town, on this day dispels most notions of
typicality and exposes its tendency to blur or exclude specific qualities that don't fit.
Generality is in this way proved unreliable by specificity -- which is the point most
great literature seeks to prove: We can see most clearly by looking most closely -and we should.
Whether my experience growing up in Mississippi in the '50s could be said to be any
more typically American than the Pakistani immigrant's experience is, of course,
moot. I am, as he is, an American. Our experience is the American experience or
part of it: tumult (in my case), a complicated and ambivalent experience of citizenry,
national identity and divisive regionalism, all incompletely reconciled by a large
political idealism which comprehends much while it attempts to oppress and coerce
as few as possible. (Maybe I should agree that the immigrant and I have more in
common than I imagined.)
And so, how does my experience inform the books I've written?
Better, probably, to say how might it have informed what I've written, since tracing
literary expression from one side of the human imagination to the other, from the
side where it's nothing but randomness and sensation, across to the side where it
becomes something (a story), is speculative, often specious. Indeed, my own
inadequate ability to distinguish my intentions from my actual accomplishments, my
willingness to inflect what I've already written to "prove" an influence, and my entire
authorial understanding of what I've written as distinct from a reader's
understanding -- all these make me not the most disinterested or discerning of selfcritics.
Therefore I feel safe saying only a very few things.
The Czech novelist Milan Kundera, in a letter to his American colleague Philip Roth,
wrote that "the novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question....
In a [totalitarian] world built on sacrosanct certainties, the novel is dead." And so,
consonant with my American experience (not at all totalitarian, but contested,
complex, ambiguous, diverse, often disharmonious to the point of profound
unsettlement), I have always tried to write stories and novels that testify to the
nature of human kind as it is displayed by the purifying heat of adversity and
disharmony and interrogation -- lovers seeking but failing to find intimacy, mutual
understanding, sympathy, consolation; fathers and sons, sons and mothers viewing
one another longingly but imperfectly across gaps of misunderstanding, struggling
with inexact expressions of affection, trying to meet the other face to face in order to
say what needs to be said. These were the circumstances -- tumultuous, rivalrous,
thorny, proprietary -- under which I came to recognize what it meant to be an
American: civil rights' struggles and Viet Nam, each of which divided families; the
McCarthy purges, which divided the nation; the aftermath of the Depression,
followed by world war and the prosperity of the Fifties.
As a second matter, I have -- and apropos of my native experience -- acted on the
need and freedom to write about and adopt diverse personas, ones that aren't my
own (women, other races, other nationalities, children) in an effort to answer the
fundamental American question specifically posed by my citizenship: How are we so
different, yet so alike? I've written stories so as to make such ambiguity tolerable,
interesting, even pleasant and beautiful.
I have also engaged politics small, in the intimate, ground-level lives of its human
participants. It was surely at that level, locked away in a small family, in a small
American city, far from the centers of power and public rhetoric, that I first saw right
and wrong enacted. Though, indeed, at some moment I couldn't have planned for, I
left the South as a subject-home, following only my curiosity, and assuming that my
local intelligence would translate to a larger American audience, and tried to take the
entire country as my setting, and more hopefully as a subject.
And finally -- and in this I don't have to speculate about what informs what -- as a
writer I've always trusted America to be a setting within which universally human
events and actions and their motives and moral consequences can be portrayed and
understood as important from any vantage point on the planet. American human
experience, while not a model for the rest of the world, has seemed at least a
plausible experience, and worthy of notice.
Ascribing one's influences is always heady, squeamishly self-important business. And
I come to this end now bemused, thinking yes, had these influences not worked on
me all these years, nothing of me or mine would be the same. Though, of course,
nothing of me would be at all. You can't remove a crucial term from the equation and
have the same equation. Popeye can't be a jet pilot or a bond salesman and be the
Popeye we love.
Today there's a writer in Chechnya writing about the influence of, well...Chechnya on
his body of work. And he's writing the same sort of things I've written, or better
things. Good, I say. For if all these years of being an American have only readied me
to realize my likeness, my kinship, my collegiality with someone I'll never know,
made me able to live literature's most precious wisdom -- then being an American,
and a writer no less, has served me very well indeed.
For Life's Sake
by
Linda Hogan
Linda Hogan is a Chickasaw writer.
She is the author of several books.
These include Dwellings; A Spiritual
History of The Natural World (W. W.
Norton, 1995), a novel entitled
Power (W.W. Norton), as well as
novels Mean Spirit, and Solar
Storms (Simon and Schuster). Mean
Spirit was a finalist for a Pulitzer,
and The Book of Medicines, a
collection of poems, was a finalist
for the National Book Critics Circle
Award.
Hogan has received numerous
awards, including a National
Endowment for the Arts grant, a
Guggenheim fellowship, a Lannan
Foundation award, the Five Civilized
Tribes Museum playwriting award,
and in 1998, the Lifetime
Achievement Award from the Native
Writers Circle of the Americas. She
has written a documentary
narrative about the history of
American Indian Religious Freedom,
I was a shy girl, quiet, never aspiring to be a writer,
never thinking to assert my Native identity, an identity
always clear to my sister and I when we were in
Oklahoma with our Chickasaw grandparents. We come
from horse and wagon grandparents, and it was not so
very long ago. The smell of the pecan trees, the black
walnut with flesh I can still smell. Then, in the '50s and
'60s, my uncle in Denver took me to powwows, then
held in small school gymnasiums. But for the most part
we didn't think of our Indian life as something
significant. History didn't interest us. We lived in other
worlds and places. And yet, within me, I held traditional
values. I didn't know then that I would become a
traditionally-minded Native woman. I grew into it the
way a person grows into their shape, the way a tree
grows, without intention, without plan, into a tree.
I didn't know, either, that I would become a writer, and
Everything Has A Spirit, seen now
on PBS. She is one of three Indian
writers hired by the Smithsonian
National Museum of the American
Indian to co-author a book for the
museum's grand opening. Hogan's
section is on tradition and how it
has been carried into recent times.
She was also a co-editor, with
Brenda Peterson, of Intimate
Nature: The Bond Between Women
and Animals, from Ballantine, and
The Sweet Breathing of Plants, from
Farrar Straus and Giroux. Two other
new books will be out in June of
2000, The Woman Who Watches
Over The World; A Native Memoir,
from W. W. Norton; and The
Mysterious Journey of The Gray
Whale, (National Geographic
Books). She is presently working on
another novel, a book of poems,
and two horses.
the fact that I come from another America has, from the beginning, been the root of
my writing.
As a girl, even though I was shy, not given to argument, I was one day able to say
to the Sunday-school teacher, who believed we were in the house of the Lord, that I
felt God when I sat under a tree. It was there, with the tree, that I felt the love of
the earth, smelling the soft soil, the blades of grass growing even as I sat.
I was a child when I first used words to argue for a tree. It was my first argument,
maybe the first one of my otherwise quiet life. Now I know that we also grow into
our words.
And, writing this, I sit beneath a tree. Sitting here, I have so far watched a
hummingbird mating ritual, the honey bees at the balm tree, the unusually marked
bees in flowering chives. A skinny fox sits on the hill above.
I didn't know, when I thought God was a tree, that my ancestors, on the night of
their removal from Mississippi to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears, were witnessed
touching the leaves of the trees, the trunks, crying. Their old friends, the trees, is
how the observer wrote about their removal to Oklahoma, Indian Territory.
In this mystery of human growing became, within me, a history contained, memory
carried from far back, ancestral knowledge.
Looking back, I can say that I was a poet by heart; I didn't need words at first. I was
an observer. I only grew into a writing life. My work was, and still is, a way of being
in the world. It is an acknowledgment that we live in a sentient world. With my work,
I try to see the world whole again. My novels, especially, give Indian people dignity,
reality in a world of stereotypes, and spiritual wholeness. I show us present, fully
present, in front of, and before, the background of America. I always acknowledge
the intelligence of the elders, and honor the world. It is work of hope, and I try to
hold within it the Indian traditional understanding of the cosmos, one that contains
constellations called Swimming Ducks, Buffalo, different than the Western
constellations. I also know the importance of the tiniest root of a plant, that it
contributes to our world. My writing is larger than I am. It comes from some other
place I can't name. I am grateful for it. In it there are the undercurrents of earth,
waves of ocean, discoveries unknown to me:
Once, in the redwood forest, I heard the beat, something like a drum or heart
coming from the ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind
of knowing inside me, a kinship and longing?I think of the people who came before
me and how they knew the placement of stars in the sky, watching the moving sun
long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only
once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small,
fine details of the world around them and of immensity above?.It is a world of
elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the
blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and
eat one another. Tonight, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors
are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and Listen. You are the result of the love of
thousands.
(Excerpt from "Walking")
I became one who would find her way into the world through writing. I reached for
the language of a larger-than-merely-human world, and through this reach, my work
as a writer has been in constant movement and change, between poetry, essay, and
story. Stories have become increasingly important to me, as has my continuing
study of ceremonial literature from many different tribes, each containing an
enormously complex knowledge, understanding of the world, and values.
In all traditions, in the views of aboriginal peoples all over the world, there is a
known, remembered, relationship between humans and the cosmos. The placement
of the human is merely a part of the Great Mysterious. Cultures that have survived
20,000 to 60,000 years can't be too wrong, I have decided.
But most importantly, I have had to learn how to wait, listen, and follow, as in the
essay above. I have had to learn, as now, sitting under a tree, for the work to reveal
itself, to come to me.
In my novel, Power, the main character has to choose between worlds she can
inhabit, the world of the elders and their great knowledge, or the world of America.
She knows geometry, English, the American world, yet she must decide whether to
leave this world for
that of her elders who live in their own community, with their own ways:
At school we hear about imploding stars, stars that fall inward the way I am falling,
but there is no place ever to touch down, there is no bottom to inward falling?I
whisper to myself as I walk and the moonlight touches me, "I leave this world. I
leave war and fear. I leave success and failure, owned things, rooms of light that
was once a river, and is now reduced."
This book began as a research project. I had been on an all-Indian working
committee for the reauthorization of the Endangered Species Act. There was a
controversial case where a Seminole man killed an endangered Florida panther. I
went to Florida to read the court records, planning to write an article for a law
quarterly. But what came to me as I was in the Everglades was the voice of that
main character, Omishto, one of those voices writers hear, and I followed what she
wanted to say.
My writing becomes a search in this way, and finding a language, words for what
can't be said in ordinary language; shades of meaning, degrees of love, moments of
wisdom that do not come from me, but from thousands of years of learning and
being. When I made my first unlearned words on the page, I did so to give a voice to
and for the voiceless, whether it is an endangered animal of the book Power, or
historical figures such as the woman Lozen, the military strategist of Geronimo, in
The Woman Who Watches Over the World. I want them to be known in this world, to
be important here, to be remembered.
This morning as I sit beneath a tree, the newly hatched spiders are leaving. The sun
shines on their strands of silk. The barn swallows are flying back and forth from mud
to their clay nests in a world of their maps. I can hear the deep breathing of the
horses behind the trees. On one of them the letters U. S. are frozen into the fur,
followed by symbols that will always define her, declare her, tell her story. She, too,
is another part of America, a rounded-up creation from the wild. And the Indian
horses have a history not unlike our own. The military, trying to round up the tribes
and move them all into Oklahoma, tried to cripple their movement by killing all their
horses, sometimes by the thousands. It's a part of history that also makes me write:
AFFINITY:
Mustang
Tonight after the sounds of day
have given way
she stands beneath the moon,
a gray rock shining.
She matches the land,
belonging.
She has a dark calm face,
her hooves like black stone
belong to the earth
the way it used to be,
long grasses
as grass followed rain
or wind laid down the plains of fall
or in winter now when
her fur changes and becomes snow
or her belly hair turns
the color of red water willows
at the creek,
her legs black as trees.
These horses
almost a shadow,
broken.
When we walk together
in the tall grasses, I feel her
as if I am walking with mystery,
with beauty and fierce powers,
as if for a while we are the same animal
and remember each other from before.
Or sometimes I sit on earth
and watch the wind blow her mane and tail
and the waves of dry grasses
all one way
and it calls to mind
how I've come such a long way
through time
to find her.
Some days I sing to her
remembering the Kiowa man
who sang to cover the screams
of their ponies killed by the Americans
the songs I know in my sleep.
Some nights, hearing her outside,
I think she is to the earth
what I am to her,
belonging.
Sometimes it seems as if we knew each other
from a time before our journeys here
In secret, I sing to her, the old songs
the ones I speak in my sleep.
But last night it was her infant that died
after the kinship and movement
of so many months
Tonight I sit on the straw
and watch as the milk streams from her nipples
to the ground. I clean her face.
I've come such a long way through time
to find her and
It is the first time
I have ever seen a horse cry.
Sing then, the wind says,
Sing.
I love the world. I love everything that lives upon it. And so I write, like this morning
under the tree. It is a world of mystery and beauty; this is what gives me words, and
those words come from the earth, the language of the land, the re-membering the
dismembered of the world, as writer Meridel LeSueur called it. I write to be one
person who helps to put the world, the lives of humans and non-humans back
together, to make them whole again. I do this for the future. I do this for life's sake.
Both Sides of the Border
by
Mark Jacobs
There is an intimate link between writing and being
stubborn. I remember the sense of satisfaction I felt
waking out of my first and only trilingual dream. It
happened after I returned from Paraguay, where I'd
spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer living in an
isolated village of cotton farmers. Paraguayans are
bilingual; everyone speaks both Spanish and Guarani.
In my dream, each of the three languages had its own
feeling-tone, its own distinct resonance. The dream had
to do with the pleasure of translating, and the
satisfaction came from being able to balance disparate
realities. It took two years of my life to get there. It's
taken a lot more stubborn effort than that to write what
I began, in Paraguay, to see.
English, of course, articulated my American identity,
the world I was born into. Spanish represented a kind
of bridge, a way of crossing over into a new but
knowable place. Years before a physical bridge existed,
my wife and I took a ferry across the Parana River in
southern Paraguay to Posadas, Argentina, where she
bought me a paperback collection of the poetry of
Borges, the first writer outside my own American
culture whose work I tried to understand (I'm still
trying). Guarani was different. It was local, rural, an
impenetrable thicket. The language belonged to
Paraguay, and it guarded its secrets. Only a few times - listening to a Chaco War veteran describe his own
personal horror in the desert; or drinking mate with a
farmer while it rained too hard to go to the fields; or
sharing a glass of cane whiskey with a restless dreamer
planning a horse race to make travel money
-- did I come close to the wall that kept me outside the
culture their Guarani protected.
It's no accident that the one place where the three
languages came together seamlessly was a dream.
Outside of dreams, it's the grinding at the edges where
cultures intersect that has fascinated, even obsessed
A Handful of Kings, Mark Jacobs'
fourth book, is forthcoming from
Simon and Schuster. The novel is
set in Madrid, where Jacobs served
as cultural affairs officer in the U.S.
embassy. Robert Olen Butler wrote
about it, "No writer is as brilliant as
Mark Jacobs at exploring the rich
fictional realm of the American
abroad. He blends the literary
traditions of Henry James and
Graham Greene in work that is truly
his own and truly wonderful. A
Handful of Kings is his best book
yet."
Jacobs' previous books include A
Cast of Spaniards (Talisman House,
1994), which Atlantic Monthly editor
C. Michael Curtis called "a
remarkable debut of an
accomplished, passionate, politically
astute new writer"; Stone Cowboy
(Soho Press, 1997), about which
The Washington Post wrote, "Every
once in a while, when you least
expect it, you stumble across a
novel that reminds you of fiction's
capacity to delight and to amaze";
and The Liberation of Little Heaven
(Soho Press, 1999), including the
story "How Birds Communicate,"
which won the 1998 Iowa Review
Fiction Award.
Jacobs has also published over
60 short stories in a range of
commercial and literary magazines
including The Atlantic Monthly, The
Southwest Review, The Southern
Review, New Letters, and The
Kenyon Review. He has worked in
Turkey, Paraguay, Bolivia, Spain
and Honduras as a foreign service
officer. He was also a Peace Corps
volunteer in rural Paraguay. He
speaks fluent Turkish and Spanish
as well as some Guarani.
me. It's probably the reason I joined the foreign service. It became the primary
material of my writing life. And it started a long way back, years before Paraguay. It
started when I did.
My parents came from very different American places. My mother's family in
Pennsylvania were rural. They fished and hunted. They were good with machinery;
they fixed tractors, lawn mowers, cars; anything with a motor. They played country
music on the stages of fire halls and bars. They were Protestant, and mostly laconic,
and suspicious of the kind of people who lived in my father's world, which was urban
and in specific ways antithetic to my mother's. My father's family worked in factories,
for the most part. They were Catholic, and in Niagara Falls they lived in
neighborhoods still divided by ethnic groups (you could be Irish and live in a Polish
neighborhood, you could be Lebanese and marry an Italian, but you knew who you
were regardless, and you knew who they were). My father's people talked more than
my mother's family did, and they spoke a different American idiom. They told stories.
Some of the stories they told were true; most of them were entertaining. Their music
was swing, their style was looser. On the gurney at Niagara Falls Memorial Hospital
in the middle of a heart attack, when medical personnel asked my father whether he
had any allergies, he responded, "Just country music."
It's too much of a stretch to say that my parents came from different cultures. The
Shumways and the Jacobs inhabited, bespoke, and defended different forces of the
same big, noisy, messy and conflictual American culture. But it's not too much to say
that watching the complicated intersection of those different dimensions of American
life is what drew me both to the foreign service and to writing about borders and the
people who cross them.
We lived in Niagara Falls but spent a lot of time in Pennsylvania, on my
grandparents' farm in Towanda. Moving back and forth between one place and the
other was a lot like crossing a border. One consequence is that, in a real way, my
brothers and I grew up comfortably bicultural. Because we had to, we learned to
understand both worlds, to speak both American idioms. We listened to the music,
read the road signs, stood at the intersections where the two families did not quite
come together.
All of that helped. Beginning with two years in Potrero Yapepo, in Itapua, Paraguay, I
lived a series of useful cultural dislocations. They were useful because they unsettled
my sense of identity, which in my case seems to have been a good way to jumpstart the imagination. In Paraguay, I bought a small portable typewriter and began
writing stories set in that country almost before I could speak the language(s).
Imagining the lives and circumstances of people whose experience was so remote
from my own was an almost unbearably arrogant thing to attempt, and I knew it. I
failed much more often than I succeeded. But I thought when I began and think
more fervently now that imagining other lives, distinct realities, experience foreign to
one's own, is not only possible, it can be the obsession of a life.
There are ways and ways to approach a culture foreign to one's own, and some of
them are full of potholes. The complexities involved in trying to understand and
represent in words a foreign culture stand out with sometimes painful clarity in the
writing of Joseph Conrad. It's hard to argue with the Nigerian novelist Chinua
Achebe's bitter indictment of the author of Heart of Darkness as a racist, but it
seems to me that there is more nuance and more valuable ambiguity in some of
Conrad's work than Achebe is willing to grant him.
In fact, "Karain: A Memory" shows another Conrad. In "Karain," the narrator, a white
gun-runner, relates the story of a Malay tribal leader with a complex and shifting set
of emotional reactions ranging from powerful sympathy to a distancing
condescension that falls back on the easy assumptions of English superiority. The
story moves giddily through a series of transitions the narrator makes between those
conflicting extremes. When it's over, the narrator brings the story to what seems, on
first read, a stolid, reassuring London scene speaking for the triumph of British
civilization over the imaginative exuberance, the flash and color and exotic excess of
"the East." But there has been too much back-and-forth movement in the course of
"Karain" to fix the story on that bustling, self-satisfied London street. Here is one
way of constructing the world, Conrad's narrator subtly suggests, and there is
another, and the truth of experience is to be found in the nervous traffic between
them. The reader walks away from "Karain" wobbling and wondering, drawn into the
cultural confrontation in a profoundly unsettling way.
What is it about Conrad that allows him to stand, if not with a foot in another culture,
then right up next to it, observing what's there to observe with an intelligent and
curious eye? One of the most perceptive Conrad critics, Edward Said, talks about the
"aura of dislocation, instability and strangeness" in the writer, the result of Conrad's
exile and alienation, his "loss of home and language." Conrad's experience was
extreme. It inflicted permanent changes on the man. He left and lost his home, his
language, and his culture for good. There was no going back to Poland. Writing in
Polish was useless. With an effort of will that defies comprehension, the sailor-writerwould-be-adventurer grasped for and appropriated a new home, an alien language, a
foreign culture. One effect of doing that was to make him intensely aware -- some
might say neurotically aware -- of what we would probably today call cultural
relativity.
In the United States, we sometimes speak almost casually about reinventing
ourselves. The possibility of reinvention has been a staple of our sense of who we are
beginning with the discovery-cum-conquest of the American continent. It runs
consistently through our culture from the Pilgrims' conviction that they were
establishing a "city on a hill" through Emerson's most provocative essays to Bob
Dylan's changing the changes album by album. Often, though, we say we have
reinvented ourselves when what we really mean is that we've changed something
about ourselves: our job, or where we live, the way we dress or pay our bills or
entertain ourselves. It's easy to forget that reinvention begins with an act of
destruction: The old self has to go to make room for the new one. Conrad knew that
because he lived it. And he lived it because he had to, not because he thought it
would be an interesting intellectual exercise.
Peace Corps and the foreign service do not come close to that kind of profound
experience of remaking oneself. Every time I left the United States, I figured I was
coming back. Although I acquired new ones, I kept my own language. I stayed
plugged into my own culture; with today's technology, and the noise it generates, it's
harder to unplug than it is to stay connected. So despite living outside of my home
culture for 15 years, I was not reinvented. Other valuable things did happen to me,
though. In the course of living and working in other countries, I was dislocated. I
was challenged and provoked. I was sometimes humbled and frequently surprised. I
wasn't reinvented, but I think it's fair to say I was enlarged.
Writing fiction set in the places that I lived in, I was drawn to certain kinds of
narrators. Tourists of any kind, including those on cultural junkets, did not interest
me much. I looked for people whose voices had the range to express a different sort
of engagement with the culture in which they found themselves. Journalists,
especially foreign correspondents, were particularly attractive because reporters tend
to be curious and irreverent and to have a strong sense of outrage, however well
channeled they keep it. They spend their time trying to figure out what's going on in
a place they were not born in. In order to write an accurate story, they have to
decipher the cultural codes. They move on, but while they're there, the good ones -and there are lots of good ones -- engage intensely with the country they cover.
Temporary or permanent expatriates, certain (but definitely not all) diplomats, aid
workers and missionaries, adventurers and spies -- all of them offer the right kind of
character for writers interested in the intersections of cultures. One thinks of the cast
of characters from Graham Greene's many novels. For an American writer, the
expats are in a sense the easy part of the mix. At least it is relatively easier to depict
them with the combination of sympathy and accuracy that good fiction demands
regardless of its subject matter. The American characters come from the writer's
own world of experience. Observed outside their element, they stand out.
Much trickier, and more likely to fail in the attempt, is the development of characters
from the countries and cultures in which the story takes place. Greene was aware of
the difficulty of doing imaginative justice to the characters he developed that were
not British. Writing about the Mexican policeman who tracks down the whiskey priest
in The Power and the Glory, he frankly says he made up the character from whole
cloth. The novel needed the intense, rigorous, and puritanical lieutenant to balance
the sloppy, weak, and dissipated priest. The author's trip through Mexico did not turn
up a human model, so he worked from scratch but was not, one senses, completely
satisfied with the result.
Writers like Achebe and Said have pointed out how easy it is to "orientalize" a foreign
culture, to use it as an exotic background on which to paint characters from one's
own culture. When that happens, the appropriated culture at best provides local
color. At worst, the story dehumanizes people in the horrific way that Achebe asserts
Heart of Darkness as doing through Marlowe's depictions of black Africans.
There's no single word ample and accurate enough to describe the world that has
succeeded the colonial era whose bloody end Conrad's work foreshadows.
Postcolonial? Sure. The world we inhabit is certainly that, but the word suggests
where we've come from more than where we're going. It doesn't do justice to the
depth of change in people's perceptions that has taken place since, say, the 1950s.
There are days when it's depressingly difficult to remain aware of that change
because of the violence that keeps happening, too often, in too many places. But the
colonial worldview is dead regardless. Those who upheld it and those who resisted it
are dead. Something else will take its place.
It's probably too soon to give it a name. We're in a transitional stage, and calling it
the postcolonial era will have to do for a while longer. But there are encouraging
signs that what emerges will be better than what we're leaving behind. In the case of
literature in English, it has already been incalculably enriched by writers from Africa,
from India, from the Caribbean and elsewhere.
Less noticed, less important but still worth thinking about, is another change that's
going on at the same time. When they travel outside the United States, American
writers are trying to do imaginative justice to characters who are not American: the
Paraguayan cotton farmer, the Honduran human rights activist who hides
incriminating documents in a broken refrigerator, the Kenyan investigative journalist
with scars and secrets, the Spanish intelligence officer whose father entertained
tourists with card tricks for shots and cigarettes.
Before she died in a plane crash, the American novelist and aid worker Maria Thomas
worked with passionate intensity to describe the complex interactions between
Africans and Americans by creating characters from both cultures of equal
complexity and credibility. At its best, Thomas' fiction radiates that elusive
combination of sympathy and accuracy that Greene was conscious of needing in his
own work. Other writers are trying to do the same. Norman Rush, Paul Eggers, and
Marnie Mueller all work to do imaginative justice to relationships across cultures in
the postcolonial world.
The 19th-century English critic Matthew Arnold once wrote that to truly appreciate
the literature of one's own culture, it was necessary to know that of another. He was
talking about how important it was to know French to understand English. Today, the
notion of paying careful attention to a culture not one's own is even more compelling.
It's also more of a challenge. The Borges I pick up tonight is not the Borges I read
while living in a converted meat market in Encarnacion. Fortunately, American
writers writing fiction set in cultures not their own have a tremendous resource
available to them, the literature of the countries about which they want to write.
Maybe it's true that wherever you travel, the way to the writing is still through the
reading.
An American Milk Bottle
by
Charles Johnson
Charles Johnson, a 1998
MacArthur Fellow, received the
National Book Award for his novel,
Middle Passage, in 1990, and is a
2002 recipient of the Academy
Award for Literature from the
American Academy of Arts and
Letters. He has published three
other novels -- Dreamer (1998),
Oxherding Tale (1982), and Faith
and the Good Thing (1974) -- as
well as two story collections, The
Sorcerer's Apprentice (1986), and
Soulcatcher (2001).
Among his many books are
King: The Photobiography of Martin
Luther King, Jr. (co-authored with
Bob Adelman, 2000), Africans in
America: America's Journey
Through Slavery (co-authored with
Patricia Smith, 1998), Being and
Race: Black Writing Since 1970
(1988), Black Men Speaking (coedited with John McCluskey Jr.,
1997), and two books of drawings.
Johnson's work has appeared in
numerous publications in America
and abroad, and has been
translated into seven languages; he
has received the Lifetime
Achievement in the Arts Award from
the Corporate Council for the Arts
as well as many other awards. In
1999, Indiana University published
a "reader" of his work entitled I Call
Myself an Artist: Writings By and
About Charles Johnson. A literary
Under a glass globe in my living room there is a
critic, screenwriter, philosopher,
remnant of my family's four centuries of history on the
international lecturer, and
cartoonist with over 1,000 drawings
North American continent. I'm sure everyone who has
published, he is the S. Wilson and
visited my home must feel it is the strangest of
Grace M. Pollock Endowed Professor
heirlooms, an indecipherable piece of the American past, of English at the University of
Washington in Seattle. You may
a tissue of time and forgotten lives. On it I often
visit his author's homepage at
perform a private hermeneutics, peeling away its layers www.previewport.com.
of meaning as one would a palimpsest. I try to imagine
(as archaeologists do with tools from Pompeii or shards of pottery from the Incas)
the African-American world of hope, struggle, heroism, and long-deferred
possibilities that background this 80-year-old object.
What rests mysteriously under glass is a thick, cloudy milk bottle, very scarred, that
bears in relief the inscription "One Pint. This Bottle Property of and Filled by
JOHNSON DAIRY CO., Evanston, Il. Wash and Return."
The venerable Johnson who owned that bottle was my late, great-uncle William. He
was born in 1892 in rural South Carolina at the end of Reconstruction, near the little
town of Abbeville, and just three years before Booker T. Washington's Atlanta
Compromise address (and the publication of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine). His
people lived close to the land. They farmed, spent their winters hunting, and
produced everything they needed. Their water came from a well. Answering nature's
call in the middle of the night meant a lonely walk outside to a foul-smelling
outhouse, one's feet stepping gingerly to avoid snakes. They put their children to
work at age five, making them fetch things for the adults and older children as they
worked. In their daily lives nothing came easily, or was taken for granted, and I am
convinced that as a boy Uncle Will was mightily influenced by Booker T.
Washington's famous program of self-reliance and his "philosophy of the toothbrush"
(cleanliness and meticulous care in all things personal and professional). That, and
perhaps Thoreau's challenging boast in Walden: "I have as many trades as fingers."
Like many black people who migrated to the north after World War I, he traveled to
Chicago and settled in Evanston, a quiet suburb, bringing with him nothing more
than a strong back, a quick wit, and a burning desire to succeed against staggering
racial odds during the era of Jim Crow segregation. In Evanston, he discovered that
white milk companies did not deliver to blacks. Always an optimist, a man who
preferred hard work and getting his hands dirty to complaining, building to
bellyaching, Uncle Will responded to racism by founding the Johnson Dairy Company,
an enterprise that did very well, thank you, delivering milk each morning to black
Evanstonians until the Great Depression brought his company to an end.
When that business failed, Uncle Will worked on a construction crew until he learned
the ropes, then he started his second venture, the Johnson Construction Company,
which lasted into the 1970s and was responsible for raising churches (Springfield
Baptist Church), apartment buildings, and residences all over the North Shore area --
places where today, long after my great-uncle's death in 1989 at the age of 97,
people still live and worship their god. In fact, once this second business took off, he
was able to promise his brothers in the South jobs for their sons and daughters if
they came north. My father accepted his offer, and met my mother shortly after
relocating to Evanston, which began the chain of causation that leads 54 years later
to this meditation on how being an American has shaped my life as a novelist, short
story writer, literary critic, philosopher, college professor, and professional cartoonist.
(For example, my great-uncle is portrayed in Chapter 7 of my last novel Dreamer as
the fictitious, black contractor Robert Jackson, whose architectural triumphs are
inescapable in Evanston.)
Put simply, I grew up in a town where every day I saw or entered buildings that
were produced by the ingenuity, sweat, and resourcefulness of my great-uncle's allblack construction crew, which once employed my father and uncles. And so, as a
child, I never doubted -- not once -- the crucial role my people have played since the
17th century colonies in the building of America on all levels -- the physical, cultural,
economic, and political. (On my mother's side, I can trace our family back to Jeff
Peters, a New Orleans coachman born around 1812.) Growing up in Evanston, and
attending schools integrated since the 1930s, I knew -- thanks to my parents, elders,
and teachers -- that American democracy was a "work-in-progress," as well as an
invitation to struggle (as I believe Benjamin Franklin once phrased it): an openended experiment in freedom which, like a torch, was passed from one black
generation to the next for its refinement and realization. My elders taught me that
racism was atavistic, destined for the trash heap of human evolution, and beneath
anyone who truly understood the real spirit of America.
As for Will Johnson, well this: I remember him as a bald, dark-skinned, potbellied,
suspender-wearing family patriarch (a role my father later assumed) who had a pew
reserved just for him in our A.M.E. church (he tithed heavily), watched the evening
news on his black-and-white TV as if it was the oracle of Delphi (every victory during
the Civil Rights Movement made him cheer the progress blacks were making in the
1950s and early '60s), and loved to see his brother's kids and his great-nephews and
nieces come over for dinner in the two-story apartment building he had designed and
built himself (he lived, naturally, on the top floor; he rented the first floor to a
beauty parlor and barber shop, and he had his office, filled with maps, blueprints,
and mysterious [to me] surveying equipment, in the basement). I remember him
once singing to me the nifty jingle he created for his milk company. To this day I kick
myself for having forgotten it. But I thank whatever powers that be for delivering to
me that lonely milk bottle, which was sealed inside the wall of a building in
downtown Evanston in the '30s (whoever had it didn't "wash and return"). A white
photographer who collected curios discovered it when the building was being
remodeled in 1975; he kept it and ultimately returned it to me as a gift in 1994 in
exchange for a signed copy of my novel Middle Passage after I gave a
commencement address at Northwestern University (they first asked President
Clinton, but when he didn't reply, they asked me), one covered by the photographer,
who when I mentioned my great-uncle, thought to himself, "Say, I have that bottle
at home!"
Whenever I walk through my living room, passing Uncle Will's milk bottle, I can hear
the urgency that entered his voice when he counseled his great-nephews and nieces
to, "Get an education. That's the most important thing you can do. Lacking that is
the only thing that slowed me down." He understood -- and made us see through his
personal example -- that while black people had endured often mind-numbing
oppression, America was founded on principles, ideals, and documents (the
Declaration of Independence and Constitution) that forced it to be forever selfcorrecting. That, he knew, was the ground that nurtured black Americans. The
opportunities denied him would be there for us, he said. But only if we were
educated and hard-working.
His vision of America, I later learned, is shared by most, if not all, the recent African,
Russian, and Asian immigrants to this country that I've been privileged to meet and
converse with. I did not fully appreciate the way foreigners view the positive features
of American life, or see that it echoed the beliefs of my own family, until I went away
to college and met a journalism major, a Ghanaian student named Fortunata Massa,
who in the late 1960s said to me, "The thing I like most about America is that no
matter what you want to learn, there is someone here who can teach it to you." With
those words my African friend summed up nicely the life of this native son. (And well
might he have added other virtues of American life, such as this nation's support for
research that leads to almost weekly discoveries in science and technological
innovations; a political system the rest of the world admires; and a healthy
promotion of competition that urges us always to be the best we can be.)
In elementary school my talent was for drawing. Writing I did for fun. I've kept a
diary, then a journal since I was 12; and I published my first two short stories in
1965 in my high school newspaper's literary supplement. But it was drawing that
fired my imagination and brought the greatest praise from my teachers. At age 14, I
declared to my parents that I intended to be a cartoonist and illustrator, a fact that
alarmed my father, who was concerned that this impractical decision might ruin my
financial future. In his gravest voice, he told me, "Chuck, they don't let black people
do that." I knew, of course, that he was wrong. My father only had a fifth-grade
education (unlike my mother, who finished high school and was a voracious reader
who belonged to three book clubs) so he knew nothing of black artists like the great
political cartoonist Ollie Harrington, E. Simms Campbell whose work appeared in
Esquire and Playboy, Morrie Turner, or George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat.
(Few people, in fact, knew Herriman was black because all his life he passed for
white.) My father's words, conditioned by his Jim Crow childhood, prompted me to
fire off a letter to a New York cartoonist I'd read about in Writer's Digest, Lawrence
Lariar. He was the cartoon editor of Parade magazine in the 1960s, a former Disney
studio "story man," editor of the annual Best Cartoons of the Year, and the author of
more than 100 books, some of them best-selling mystery novels. I told him what my
father said. Within a week Lariar mailed me a spirited reply: "Your father is wrong.
You can do whatever you want with your life. All you need is a good teacher." To
shorten a long story, Lawrence Lariar, a liberal Jewish man (he changed his last
name in the '40s) who frequently infuriated his neighbors by inviting black artists to
his Long Island home, where he instructed them, became my teacher. (My dad, after
seeing Lariar's letter, backed off and paid for my lessons.) Two years later I was
publishing illustrations for the catalog of a Chicago company that sold magic tricks,
and I won two awards in a national competition, sponsored by a journalism
organization, for high school cartoonists. Over the next seven years, between 1965
and 1972, I published over 1,000 cartoons and illustrations; two books of comic art,
Black Humor (1970) and Half-Past Nation Time (1972); and while earning a
bachelor's degree in journalism at Southern Illinois University, I created, hosted, and
co-produced an early, nationally televised PBS series called "Charlie's Pad" (1970) on
which I taught others how to draw -- the series ran on public TV stations around the
country and Canada for about a decade. The best of this juvenalia has been
anthologized, and can be seen in Paul Mandelbaum's First Words: Earliest Writing
From Favorite Contemporary Authors (1993), Tonya Bolden's Tell All the Children
Our Story (2001), and in John McNally's Humor Me: An Anthology of Humor by
Writers of Color (2002).
The insight of Fortunata Massa and my great-uncle was proven again when, in 1970,
I began seriously writing novels, producing six in two years before I decided I
needed to find a good teacher, one who would understand my desire to explore and
expand the 20th century tradition of American philosophical fiction. As luck would
have it, as I was finishing a master's degree in philosophy and starting my seventh
novel, Faith and the Good Thing, the late novelist and writing teacher John Gardner,
himself a philosophical writer, became my mentor, providing me with brilliant literary
guidance and friendship from 1972 until his death in a motorcycle accident ten years
later. As a teacher for 26 years, I know -- as I know nothing else -- that since the
1960s the availability of knowledge is the single greatest feature of American
democracy, one that empowers and liberates its citizens.
It is a gift I have never taken for granted, not after promising my great-uncle that,
yes sir, I would "get an education." I relied on this virtue of Yankee life when in 1967
I began training in the Chinese martial arts at a kwoon in Chicago, then at other
schools in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and co-directed with a friend our own
Choy Li Fut kung-fu studio for ten years; when I earned a doctorate in philosophy at
the State University of New York at Stony Brook, devoting my dissertation, Being
and Race: Black Writing Since 1970, to the creation of a phenomenological aesthetic
for black fiction; and, finally, when -- after receiving a MacArthur fellowship four
years ago -- I decided to deepen my life's long devotion to Buddhism by learning
Sanskrit, not at a university but instead by studying the holy texts of Hinduism and
Advaita Vedanta in the original Devanagari script with a Vedic priest who lives in
Portland, Oregon, and offers private instruction. As Fortunata put it, whatever you
want to learn, there is someone in America who can teach it to you. Yet with this
freedom comes a footnote: Because we enjoy such liberty, we are obliged all our
lives to give in even greater measure to others.
So I've always seen my American life as an adventure of learning and growth and
service. In this country no individual or group, white or black, could tell me not to
dream. Or censor me. Or prevent me from laboring until those dreams of artistic
creation and self-improvement became reality. Some tried, of course, but in America
I knew that our passions define our possibilities. Sometimes when I'm working late
at night, and walk from my second-floor study downstairs to the kitchen for a fresh
cup of tea, I see his milk bottle on an end-table, and I try to imagine how Will
Johnson must have looked, early in the morning before sunrise, carrying clinking
bottles like this down empty, quiet streets from one Negro family's doorstep to
another, hustling to get ahead, to carve out a place for himself and his loved ones
against the backdrop of the New Deal and a world careening toward war. I wonder
how tightly the dreams of this tall, handsome, industrious black man were tied to
these tiny pint containers. Did other black men tell him he was foolish to try
competing with the white milk companies? Did he stay up nights wondering, like any
entrepreneur (or artist), if he might fall on his face with nothing to show for his
sweat and sacrifices except spilled milk? If so, then that was just all right. For
America guaranteed that he would have the chance to dream again.
On Being an American Writer
by
Bharati Mukherjee
Bharati Mukherjee, author and
professor of English at the
University of California, Berkeley, is
well known both as a writer of
fiction and as a social commentator.
I published my first short story when I was a
teenager in Calcutta. It concerned Napoleon's final days
on St. Helena. That story was followed by Marie
Antoinette awaiting the guillotine, then others featuring
assorted figures from Roman history. Those first
"gleanings" were testimonies to the inflexible standards
of British schooling for girls from "elite" families
attending an Irish convent school. The Overseas
Cambridge curricula transcended borders and
continents; we could have been in Hong Kong,
Johannesburg, Adelaide, or Port-of-Spain -- wherever
local standards were considered slack or non-existent -and turned out the same.
The whole point was, Calcutta (or wherever) did not
exist. We did not have interesting lives. Our own
cultures were vaguely shameful, and certainly not fit
subjects for serious literature.
We read Jane Austen, of course, and Virginia Woolf. We
became masters of Victorian literature and some of us
had much of Shakespeare down by heart. For
recreation, we read the Russians and French, and for
guilty pleasures we dipped into the lending-library
fiction favored by our mothers. Think Monica Dickens
and Daphne du Maurier. "American literature" was an
oxymoron. Americans were the ultimate aliens, too
busy churning out movies to bother much with books.
Then, perhaps inevitably, one book, Dubliners, broke
through. This was a different kind of appeal, something
urgent and disturbing. A door had opened, and I had to
enter. Writing (unlike reading) was not just safe and
decorative. Suddenly, I wanted to do for Calcutta what
Joyce had done for Dublin. My Calcutta seethed with
hypocrisy and suppressed misery. Out with Napoleon,
in with Narendra.
Her most recent novel is Desirable
Daughter (Hyperion, 2002). Her
other novels are The Holder of the
World (1993), Jasmine (1989), Wife
(1975), and The Tiger's Daughter
(1971). Her short stories are to be
found in The Middleman and Other
Stories (1988), and in Darkness
(1985). Nonfiction includes The
Sorrow and the Terror: The
Haunting Legacy of the Air India
Tragedy, with Clark Blaise (1987),
and Days and Nights in Calcutta,
with Clark Blaise (1986).
Mukherjee earned a Ph.D. in
English and comparative literature
from the University of Iowa in 1969.
In the '70s, she taught at McGill
University, Montreal, Canada. She
moved to the United States in 1980,
taught at various colleges, and has
been teaching at the University of
California, Berkeley, since 1989.
Much of her writing chronicles
various facets of the immigrant
experience.
Born in 1940 in Calcutta, India,
to a professional family, Mukherjee
received a classical education, as
she writes in the essay below, in
the British tradition. Between 1948
and 1951, she lived with her family
in England. She graduated from the
University of Calcutta in 1959, and
received a Master's Degree in
English and Ancient Indian Culture
in 1961. A visit to the University of
Iowa in 1961 to attend the Writer's
Workshop changed her life and
focused her intently on what she
had dreamed of becoming: a
professional writer. Mukherjee had
planned to return to India;
however, while at Iowa she met and
married Clark Blaise, the
Canadian/American writer, a
decision that guaranteed that,
thereafter, her life would be part of
two worlds. One critic writes:
"Mukherjee has established herself
as a powerful member of the
American literary scene, one whose
most memorable works reflect her
pride in her Indian heritage, but
also her celebration of embracing
America."
I mention these long-ago embarrassments only to make the point that I considered
myself a writer from an early age. I don't doubt that I would have been a writer if I
had married the "suitable boy" selected by my father and had never left India. The
kind of writer I became, however, has more to do with coming to America and the
Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, marrying a fellow student (an Americaborn Canadian) and moving with him to Canada for 14 years. We returned to the
United States when we were both 40 years of age.
My Iowa thesis was titled "The Shattered Mirror," every story an "Araby"-inspired
study of Calcutta disenchantment, carefully arranged as to epiphanies. One of them
was published in an American quarterly, and merited a letter of inquiry from a
Boston publisher. By then, I had a baby and a full load of doctoral classes. As soon I
got the degree, I told the editor, I would write her a novel. What followed was The
Tiger's Daughter, brought out by Houghton-Mifflin in 1972. I thought of it then as the
beginning of my American writing career, but in truth it was the end of that longnurtured Indian "project."
Because of American visa restrictions, there were very few Indians in America in
1961 when I'd arrived as a student, and because of Indian government restrictions
on foreign exchange, there were practically no Indian women in the arts. As hard as
it might be to imagine today, there was no Indian community, no models, no readers,
and no editors ready to receive work from an Indian immigrant writer. A dozen years
later, my second agent told me I had no future as a writer if I insisted on writing
about downscale immigration in New Jersey and not upper-class exotica in Calcutta.
That's the reason, perhaps, that I have clung so fiercely to the notion of my unhyphenated, mainstream place in American writing. Perhaps it's too great a stretch
for critics and reviewers to see me, and writers like me, as anything other than
"Indian," "Indo-American," or "Asian." I'm far more impatient with hostility from
Indian and India-born American scholars in "post-colonial" disciplines who
instinctively disparage anything with an American provenance. (Their mantra seems
to be that if America or the West in general set themselves up as the pinnacle in
social and political evolution, then it is the duty of all children of colonialism to
oppose them "asymmetrically," that is, in any way they can.) The nuns in my old
Calcutta convent-school were equally dismissive and asymmetrical, without benefit
of post-Marxist theory.
My second novel, Wife (Houghton-Mifflin, 1975), was written while I was on
sabbatical leave in Calcutta. I was then a Canadian citizen living in Montreal, a
professor at McGill University, but also writing my half of a journal, Days and Nights
in Calcutta (Doubleday, 1977) with my husband, Clark Blaise. We spent 1974-75
living inside my joint family in Calcutta, surrounded by all my relatives, speaking my
native language for the first time in a dozen years -- and I came to a profound
conclusion. I was no longer Indian in mind or spirit.
The weight of tradition, even the multifarious tyrannies of a loving family, was no
longer tolerable to me. In endless conversations with my old school friends, my
parents and sisters, I realized that I had slipped a cog or two. It became clear to me
-- another door opening -- that I was an immigrant writer in the tradition of other,
older (European) immigrant groups. I had learned more from Henry Roth (Call It
Sleep) and the novels and stories of Bernard Malamud than from any Indian writer.
And more to the point (since Canada had begun to react against the sudden
presence of so many Indians in its midst), I valued the civil rights protections of the
American Constitution over the lack of such guarantees at that time in Canada and
the U.K.. We moved to the United States in 1980.
Although becoming an American has come at a cost (my husband and I have not
been able to teach in the same city at the same time with anything like comparable
jobs, as we had in Montreal), becoming an American writer has finally granted me
the voice and authority to speak from a community, and for an emerging
consciousness. During the 14 years I'd spent in Canada, a viable, even thriving,
Indian community had arrived in the United States. In 1985, I published my first
book of stories, Darkness (Viking-Penguin), a series of portraits of Indians-intransition between the pride of cultural retention (exile/expatriation), and the fear of
cultural surrender (immigration). In that book, I stumbled upon my true subject
matter, my personal "great theme": transformation, in all its grotesque glory.
Immigration often involves dislocation and social demotion. Immigrants carry the
bruises, and often the scars, from missed signals and misread signs. They've traded
their certain place (sometimes humble, sometimes exalted) in a fixed society for a
crazy chance at something elusive called personal happiness. I don't say they'll find
it; it's enough that they try.
In that spirit, I wrote a second volume of stories, The Middleman (Grove, 1988) and
a novel, Jasmine (Grove-Weidenfeld, 1989). By the time of that second volume of
stories and the novel that followed it, the theme of "transformation" had freed me to
write from inside disparate characters and backgrounds. My concerns were now with
a two-way transformation, the sometimes painful recognition on the part of
America's native sons and daughters that their identity had been changed by these
new "exotic" immigrants, as much as American influence had wrought unpredictable
transformations upon its latest newcomers from the subcontinent, the Middle East,
Latin America, the Philippines, and southeast Asia.
My three novels of the past decade, The Holder of the World (Knopf, 1993), Leave It
to Me (Knopf, 1997) and Desirable Daughters (Hyperion, 2002) take up questions
that seem to me a logical continuation of the same thematic concern. Now that a
highly visible "new America" has established itself on this continent, how does it
accommodate itself to the deeper rhythms of America, even to an American history
that seems, on the surface, to have denied their very existence? The first of those
novels is set contemporaneously and in the colonial America of the 1650s, restoring
a bit of Mugal tapestry to the prevailing gray of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. The
second takes up the legacy of Vietnam from the Asian orphan's point of view, and
the latest, the unintended consequences of globalization, as it plays out in the
hundred-year history of a representative Indian family, both here and in the
homeland.
I want to clear the air of unmerited disparagement of American writing, this time not
from Irish nuns or Indian intellectuals, but from many well-intentioned indigenous
progressives. My defense may sound harsh and open me to misunderstanding. In the
1970s and 80s we heard a lot of criticism from the reading public (the high-minded
sorts who routinely endorse Nobel Prize selections) that American writers -- with a
few obvious exceptions -- have ignored the mammoth horrors of the 20th century.
We, American writers, are criticized for being concerned with little more than
agonizing over questions of identity. And when our novels do address forms of
suffering, we are accused of acting out oppression-envy. Authors and readers from
countries where a book can result in the author's imprisonment or exile demand how
the over-privileged can speak with authority on poverty, injustice, and corruption.
What do American writers know of oppression from tradition, from family, religion,
the state, and foreign invasion? Americans can settle injustice in a lawsuit. We can
escape domestic brutality with a divorce. We can vote the rascals out of office. We
can buy state-of-the-art medication to relieve our anxieties and enhance our selfworth.
Even the partially sympathetic critic from Latin America or post-colonial countries -the critic who doesn't expect a Marquez or a Solzhenitsyn to pop up from our
shopping malls, who doesn't scorn the U.S. publishing industry's obsession with
mega-dollar advances and circus-like book tours -- is heard asking, "America, where
are your concerned writers with stricken conscience?" Aren't you ashamed that you
have no equivalents of post-War Germans like Grass and B? white South Africans like
Gordimer and Coetzee, Israelis like Grossman and Oz, and those marvelous
Australians like Malouf and Keneally? (The short answer is we have many, and for
the most part, the weight of social and historic injustice has fallen upon them
personally, and asymmetrically. The longer answer is, look under the bland, welltended surface. The mini-acreage of disenchantment might hide a mother-lode of
injustice.)
In other words, what have you, as a writer, done for societies lacking democratic
institutions and traditions, a loyal opposition, a free press and independent judiciary
and an honest civil service? As a fiction writer, what responsibilities do you feel for
countries that have been oppressed by colonial powers, war, pestilence, religious and
tribal intolerance, corrupt police, judges, politicians and journalists, and for societies
that are overcrowded, undereducated, unsanitary, and psychologically wounded? The
answer to that is: very little. As an essayist, as a concerned citizen, as a worldtraveler, I'm well aware of my country's influence in the world for good and evil. I
acknowledge the long history of American involvement and encouragement of global
forces that often result in widespread devastation (or silence and active
discouragement which have the same effect), and try to speak, act and vote
accordingly. In countries that have no reliable instruments of redress, writers are
often pressed into service as the first witness, or last resort. But in liberal
democracies with well-established institutions, fiction writers can afford a modicum
of vigilant trust, freeing themselves to celebrate the impacted glories of individual
consciousness. That's why Joyce and Proust and Woolf and Borges and Nabokov
never got the Nobel Prize. Probably it's why Vargas Llosa and Kundera and Oates and
Updike and Roth will wait in vain.
It's not that we're navel-gazing cowards or lacking in conscience; writers are, with
some exceptions, a like-minded tribe. On the international level, I've found serious
writers to be universally skeptical of authority, ironic, and sympathetic to the lost
and baffled. They feast on incongruity and absurdity, they're quick to appreciate
another's work and to recognize the different forces that shape it. Nadine Gordimer
once remarked she'd wanted to write comedies of manner -- it's the oppressive
South African situation that made it impossible. The Bengali filmmaker, Satyajit Ray,
wanted to make fantasies, even science-fiction films, but Calcutta with all its
problems and all its charms would not permit it. The quest for relevance and
engagement takes from a writer as least as much as it gives.
About the time I arrived in the United States 40 years ago as a graduate student at
the University of Iowa, the precocious Philip Roth published his celebrated essay,
"Writing American Fiction." The contents of that essay remain pertinent, for in it he
laid out the dominant concerns of a new generation of American writers: How does
the private imagination compete with the frivolity, the prodigious absurdity, vulgarity,
violence, and exuberant replicability of American culture? Its sheer weirdness
threatens to mock any attempt at inventing it. And here we have a major difference
between American fiction and nearly everyone else's: Nothing here is a given, nor is
it permanent; everything is mutable, challengeable. There is no history, there are no
barriers, no taboos, no fatwa can be launched, and no secret police will knock on
your door. (Or, anticipating the objections those colonial theorists will raise to such
blanket assertions -- if they knock on your door, and no one says they haven't in the
past and will try it again -- you at least have means of redress.)
Many writers in the world suffer an excess of givens, inherited realities of unforgiving
consequence, of narrow possibilities and constricted horizons. It enriches their fiction,
lengthens the odds, and raises the stakes. American writers express bafflement in a
wilderness of freedom, a vast realm of spontaneous improvisation where the chances
are very good that your best stab will not measure up to the next news squib on
CNN. What mad satirist thought up the 2000 election in which a poorly designed
ballot played a pivotal role in determining the next American president? Is such a
comic turn even conceivable anywhere else in the world? And what would have been
its bloody consequence?
American fiction is written in a context of relative innocence, a reality that is both
limiting and liberating. If American fiction has relevance in the world it is for the odd
innocence it celebrates. And this is particularly true of Indian-immigrant fiction, since
many of us arrived after the cultural and political wars of the '60s and never
experienced the civil rights battles or the Vietnam resistance. We are the
beneficiaries of much suffering and heroism, and we've not been called on to pay our
dues. Until we do, our innocence is provisional, our freedom is still qualified.
I have been fortunate that my writing-life has corresponded with the arrival of others
like me -- and that I was here just a little earlier, in time to greet them. I began my
career writing in the comic mode -- a reflection of my inheritance from the norms of
Indo-British schooling -- because the early years of Indian life on this continent
seemed fresh and exuberant, greedy, ambitious, loving, and awkward. I seemed to
be witnessing a blessed interval, the generation or two in the life of an immigrant
community, before memories of the Old World entirely vanish, and with them, the
codes and norms that have regulated and restricted self-expression for thousands of
years. I know when it changed for me. In 1985, an Air India flight from Toronto and
Montreal carrying 329 passengers and crew was bombed from the skies 110 miles off
the coast of Ireland. Until the bombing of the World Trade Center, it was bloodiest
terrorist act of the modern era; it is still the deadliest si ngle air-assault. Nearly all of
the victims were Canadians of Indian origin. So were the Khalistani (Sikhsecessionist) perpetrators. We knew some of the victims, the majority of whom were
mothers and children heading home for the summer. The cream of a generation, the
Canadian first-born, perished in that crash. Indian immigrants, the low-crime, highachievement "model minority," were the first in the recent wave of modern brutality
to suffer a massive act of terrorism on this continent.
My husband and I wrote an investigation of the tragedy, The Sorrow and the Terror
(Viking-Penguin 1987), and in the process of interviewing the bereaved, the police
and lawyers, even the killers and their supporters, my understanding of the stakes in
immigration changed forever. It's not just comic, not just literary; it's a big story and
one that Americans will be writing for decades to come.
This Crutch That I Love
by
Naomi Shihab Nye
A Writer's Life, Past and Present
I.
In the center of the United States, in the middle of the
20th century, many people had come from somewhere
else, and were figuring out how to put things together.
The French Canadians had traveled south to St. Louis in
a large, rattling car filled with children and sweaters.
The friendly Italian family had planted small, rounded
trees in their yard. They told newcomers where to buy
the best vegetables and seeds. On a cracked street
without sidewalks, families set up humble households,
unpacked their spoons and sewing machines, mingling
outside before sunset. Everything felt softly dreamy
right before dark, the air full of accents, and fragrances.
The organic farmers up the street described their
grandparents, immigrants from Germany, who had
dreamed of owning land in the New World.
I looked around. Was this new? Everything always felt
old to me.
I started writing poems at age six to see what was
already there. Savory accents and blends.
Naomi Shihab Nye grew up in St.
Louis and Jerusalem and currently
lives in San Antonio, Texas with her
husband, photographer Michael
Nye, and their son. A graduate of
Trinity University, her recent books
include 19 Varieties of Gazelle,
Come with Me: Poems for a
Journey, and Fuel (poems); and
Habibi (a novel for teens that won 6
Best Books awards). Daughter of a
Palestinian father and an American
mother, she has edited six prizewinning anthologies of poetry for
young readers, including This Same
Sky, The Tree is Older than You
Are, The Space Between our
Footsteps: Poems & Paintings from
the Middle East, What Have You
Lost? and Salting the Ocean. She
has worked as a visiting writer in
schools and communities for 28
years, traveling abroad numerous
times for the Arts America program
of the former United States
Information Agency. A recipient of a
Guggenheim Fellowship and a
Library of Congress Witter Bynner
Fellowship, she is currently a
member of the National Council of
the National Endowment for the
Humanities.
Where were the Indians? Someone was always missing. I felt them in the stones and
trees, the deep river called Mississippi, an Indian name, tumbling silently past.
My Palestinian father had journeyed to the United States on a ship in 1951, throwing
his faded trousers from Jericho into the water just before the boat docked in New
York City. If he was starting a new life, why did he need old pants? A university
scholarship student, he'd requested a school "in the middle of America," thinking the
location would give him easy access to everywhere. Little did he realize how big the
country was. It would be many years before he saw California.
He had no idea he would marry an American (of German/Swiss descent) when he
arrived. The United States was full of surprises.
Although he would miss his homeland deeply and always be dreaming of it, he dove
into his new life with enthusiasm. He told funny folk tales from the Middle East and
sang in Arabic. We ate hummus while the neighborhood ate hamburgers and
spaghetti. My father loved the United States for its optimism, and for welcoming him
as it had welcomed millions of immigrants before him.
Everything was possible in the United States -- this was not just a rumor, it was true.
He might not grow rich overnight, but he could sell insurance, import colorful gifts
from around the world, start little stores, become a journalist. He could do anything.
This was the great shared pleasure of the land and he held it in his heart and
guarded its trust. He stood up for the United States and was proud to become a
citizen, even though he had not planned to become a citizen when he first came over.
After a while, a very quick while, the United States got into your skin and your blood,
it became part of your own sweet melody and history, and you wanted to belong to it,
the way it let so much belong to you.
My mother, who had been raised in an American home with a strict Lutheran father,
and a shy, repressed mother, was ready to taste the flavors of a wider world herself
-- New Recipes, New Ideas! She went to art school and studied with some of the
great artists of the 20th century. She took us to Quaker meetings and the Vedanta
Society where we loved Swami Satprakashananda, eating rice pudding with him on
his birthday for years. We attended an inclusive, modern church called Unity that
said every path was an honorable path. My father visited these halls of worship with
us, though he had been raised Muslim.
My parents agreed on the most important issues -- there were many paths to truth.
There were, in fact, many truths. Why pretend otherwise? No way was the only way.
Anyone who said a single religion or culture was the only "right one" was delusional
and ridiculous. The days of tribalism and righteous exclusiveness were over, obsolete.
They had to be over. All the world's citizens were mixing themselves together by now,
in order to survive reasonably. Along the way, we would learn to respect everyone
else, especially the people who weren't just like us. It was obvious, essential.
Though integration was still under way in the United States, many people had known
for a long time that we were all connected. That you couldn't say "equal rights" and
"due process" and not mean everybody. It just took the official systems longer to
catch up. I would return to that modest neighborhood many times over the years to
find it TRULY mixed by now, black and white families living side-by-side the way I'd
wished it was when I was little too.
It was always hard to understand where people drew their lines.
Perhaps I started writing simply to see where we were -- my beautiful group of
passionate characters -- needing, hoping, planting, waiting -- in their central plot in
their central city. Central was even the name of the school we attended. It stands to
this day, red brick solemnity, ancient and proud. George Washington's solemn face
still hangs in the hallway. I would stare into his eyes and wonder. Are you happy
with your land?
What did it mean to be in the middle of everything? I told myself, this is only one
country, this is not the world! Stop thinking you are so important!
But the details of every minor day felt crucial and precious to me in their sweet
brevity. Tiny things other people overlooked seemed like treasures and clues. I wrote
them down, so I would not forget them. I did not begin writing because I imagined
"a future career."
No one ever said to me, You cannot say that thing. You cannot say that thing that
way.
I wrote with yellow pencils on tablets of paper, the backs of paper sacks. Sometimes
I shared poems with other people. A teacher told us, "Your voice will be your
greatest tool," and I believed her. I went to school and came home to find words
waiting for me. Soon I would begin writing in the margins of workbooks, on the
edges of mathematics papers. I played with words, stacking and rearranging them.
Poetry was beautiful to me because of all the space around it. Writing was a way to
have an anchor, to see what held you down.
In the neighborhood, that savory brew of a place, that fragrant mixture of histories,
people wished each other well, trading news, imagining good things would happen in
days to come. No one had much money, but everyone had hope. And I had the
library, which was better than a trunk full of gold. Rabindranath Tagore, the great
Bengali poet, had written about placing his words in a small boat, sending them
floating down a stream, wondering if anyone in some "far place" might read them
and know who he was.
"I do!" I shouted back across the sea. "I know you and I like you! I am your faraway friend!"
I shouted the same response to Margaret Wise Brown, Emily Dickinson, Walt
Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, William Blake, Louisa May Alcott, the
Japanese poet Basho. The list would grow and grow. I was always searching hungrily
for voices from over the ocean, those mysterious and important worlds we heard
about. My horizon through reading felt much wider than the spatial horizon. What it
meant to discover magazines that invited writing by children was -- someone you
don't know is listening out there. If they print your poem, your world will grow
beyond anything you can see.
But the writing itself was the power, the daily declaration of independence, saying, I
am part of all this magnificent diversity and intricate texture, but I am not this. I am
more than this. So are you. Everything was possible on the page.
I would stand outside the circle to see what went on. I would be the onlooker,
documentarian of the miniature and forgotten. What was said and lost would linger
in my ears.
Writing was a way to slow time down, to claim a moment and a space on the earth,
to look INTO things, not just at them. If we only looked at outer surfaces of
situations, we could easily feel separate from others. Contemplating deeper
meanings or implications, the metaphorical possibilities of any scene, one might find
endless shining and connected cords.
The details I recorded did not have to be significant or dramatic
-- they might be the secret hide-away between pine trees, the cedar scent of my
grandmother's closet, the sad, forgotten alleyways, my friend's mother in a
wheelchair who talked to me about bravery, the blossoming redbud trees, the
buckets of cherries we baked into pies, the teacher who loved her students for more
than 50 years and told us to never stop believing in our voices, the boy in the next
house who was told, when he was seven, he would not grow. We were there when
his parents announced this to the neighborhood. He will not grow. He was standing
right with us when they said this and I saw the depth of his sorrowful eyes.
Where would you put such information if you did not write?
In your memory, to be sure, but I wanted to be able to go back to it, think about its
resonances, hold it in my hands, look at it.
I needed to find out more about the hard things: unfulfilled longing, depression,
disappointment, fear, conflict.
If writing was a crutch, I needed help walking.
II.
It is so long since I was a child, but I still feel closer to children than to adults. What
is it about that early way of seeing that continues to guide us, even when our eyes
are tired, even when we have heard enough bad news to make us lie down and curl
up into a ball?
Have people lived up to their best dreams of what human beings could be? Have we
helped one another enough? How often do we really listen to others? Are we always
too interested in giving our own opinions, even while others are speaking? Does
greed guide too many decisions?
Shouldn't we discover at least one new voice every week?
American writers travel around the United States a lot. We travel around other
countries too, talking, listening, discovering writers we need to know more about.
Who would ever have thought writers would be such nomads? We are invited to
speak to students, give speeches, attend conferences.
I visit a wonderful school in Bahrain where a little girl writes me the best letter I've
received in a long time. She says, "What is hard for you?" It takes me almost a
whole day to answer her.
An unwillingness to communicate feels hard. We must keep encouraging one another
to use our voices in hard situations. If people believed more in the Power of Voice,
would we have so much violence in the world?
American writers feel lucky that anyone wants to listen to us -- we have such a short
history, after all. We feel lucky to sit around with our pencils and papers, staring and
mulling. This was always my best dream for the future. My dream did not have
computers in it, but those too have become our allies.
To this day, no one has ever said to me, You cannot say that thing. They may have
said, Thank you, but we do not wish to publish this thing, or, This thing could
certainly be improved upon, but they have not said, You cannot say it.
Freedom of speech is the greatest gift America has given us all and I will treasure it
forever and continue to remind people about it because sometimes if you have had it
forever, you don't realize you have it.
We feel responsibilities to speak for ourselves and for communities we care about.
Translation has opened so many worlds between countries -- it is our privilege and
responsibility to read each other.
Everywhere is central.
We must remember that and live accordingly.
In recent years many American writers have written or edited books about cultures
that were not their own to begin with. Living in a primarily Latino neighborhood in
downtown San Antonio, Texas, gave me a culture that was not mine by blood, but
one I care greatly about. Perhaps I had to live in a Latino city to learn what it really
meant to be Arab-American -- how precious the spectrum of flavors, how many ways
they intersect and blend.
Recently, an African-American journalist ended his newspaper column about a series
of local Korean tragedies by saying, "We must remember: we are all Korean."
A scene, from a few weeks ago.
Setting: The second Skagit River Poetry Festival, La Conner, Washington, an hour
and a half north of Seattle, along the shining watery channels leading out to the
islands called San Juan, and the traveling whales.
The Swinomish tribal members (Native Americans -- the so-called American Indians I
was always looking for as a child) are hauling large dry logs to the giant fires in their
sacred smoke-house where hundreds of people sit on wooden bleachers to listen to
poetry readings.
Tonight, the Native American tribe has barbecued fresh local salmon, cooked up
large pots of beans, and welcomed hundreds of people to dinner. We have eaten
together at long tables in a meeting house across the road.
Some drumming and chanting opens the evening reading. People with asthma sit
near the door so they won't inhale too much smoke. A Swinomish elder in her 80s,
wearing a shawl, rises and tells a story to welcome us.
There is Pat Mora (Latina), Li-Young Lee (Chinese-American), Edward Hirsch (JewishAmerican), Joy Harjo (Native American), Kurtis Lamkin (African-American, who plays
native African instruments when he speaks his poems), Colleen McElroy (AfricanAmerican), Madeline DeFrees (a nun for more than 30 years before leaving her
order), and the witty Thomas Lux and David Lee, who writes in a colloquial smalltown vernacular. This festival feels like a reunion, since we have all met before and
read one another's work and value the power of communication above everything
else.
I look around the giant smoky space at poets and listeners of all ages and think,
Incredible. Every voice is welcomed. No one says, Use my style. I think, This is my
second family. The family that adopted me. The world of words that helped me make
a map of this mysterious living. How various we are in our eccentric, multi-colored
land, our trails dotting so many landscapes, cultures and histories up till now.
If I had to choose one word to describe this world, it would be acceptance.
In a family of voices this wide, no one can be excluded. Do you hear me? The little
boats are traveling out to you.
A Provincial Sense of Time
by
Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky teaches in the
graduate creative writing program
at Boston University. He is poetry
editor for the online magazine
Slate, and he reads poems as a
contributor to public television's The
Newshour with Jim Lehrer.
Jersey Rain, Pinsky's most
recent book of poems, was
published by Farrar, Straus &
Giroux in 2000. Another volume of
his poetry, The Figured Wheel: New
and Collected Poems 1966-1996
was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize
and received both the Lenore
Marshall Award and the Ambassador
Book Award of the English Speaking
Union. His other awards include the
Shelley Memorial Award, the
William Carlos Williams Prize and
the Los Angeles Times Book Award
as well as the Howard Morton
Landon Translation Prize for his
best-selling translation The Inferno
of Dante. He is a member of the
American Academy of Arts and
Sciences and the American
Academy of Arts and Letters.
Pinsky is co-editor of Americans'
Favorite Poems and the more recent
Poems to Read, both anthologies
that grew out of his Favorite Poem
Project. Among his prose works are
The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief
Guide, and his recent Democracy,
Culture and the Voice of Poetry.
During Pinsky's tenure as poet
laureate of the United States, from
1997-2000, he created the Favorite
Poem Project to document,
promote, and celebrate poetry's
place in American culture. In
addition to the anthologies, the
project has produced 50 video
I grew up in a town where one of my grandfathers
segments showcasing Americans
had a well-known bar -- across from City Hall, it was
reading and speaking about poems
they love and a Web site,
the place where the politicians and policemen drank.
www.favoritepoem.org, featuring
When I was ten years old the chief of the Long Branch
the videos and a forum for teachers
police was a man who had been one of my
and students.
grandfather's employees in the 1920s, when the liquor
He lives in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, with his wife, Dr.
business was illegal. My other grandfather washed the
Ellen Pinsky.
windows for most of the stores in Long Branch, New
Jersey. My father, an optician, was a noted local athlete, voted Best-Looking Boy in
his class at Long Branch High School, where he and my mother met when they were
students there, as were my aunts and uncles and cousins as well as my brother and
sister and me.
In such a place, there are stories. The stories are as if in the air -- did it happen to
your father or to someone he heard of, did it happen in his generation or another? It
is as if the stories are alive, and the people temporary containers, which is to say it
is like a form of possession by the dead. Pleasure Bay is a section of Long Branch,
near the lower-middle-class street on which my father and I both lived as children
(the houses are on the same block):
AT PLEASURE BAY
In the willows along the river at Pleasure Bay
A catbird singing, never the same phrase twice.
Here under the pines a little off the road
In 1927 the Chief of Police
And Mrs. W. killed themselves together,
Sitting in a roadster. Ancient unshaken pilings
And underwater chunks of still-mortared brick
In shapes like bits of puzzle strew the bottom
Where the landing was for Price's Hotel and Theater.
And here's where boats blew two blasts for the keeper
To shunt the iron swing-bridge. He leaned on the gears
Like a skipper in the hut that housed the works
And the bridge moaned and turned on its middle pier
To let them through. In the middle of the summer
Two or three cars might wait for the iron trusswork
Winching aside, with maybe a child to notice
A name on the stern in black-and-gold on white,
Sandpiper, Patsy Ann, Do Not Disturb,
The Idler. If a boat was running whiskey,
The bridge clanged shut behind it as it passed
And opened up again for the Coast Guard cutter
Slowly as a sundial, and always jammed halfway.
The roadbed whole, but opened like a switch,
The river pulling and coursing between the piers.
Never the same phrase twice, the catbird filling
The humid August evening near the inlet
With borrowed music that he melds and changes.
Dragonflies and sandflies, frogs in the rushes, two bodies
Not moving in the open car among the pines,
A sliver of story. The tenor at Price's Hotel,
In clown costume, unfurls the sorrow gathered
In ruffles at his throat and cuffs, high quavers
That hold like splashes of light on the dark water,
The aria's closing phrases, changed and fading.
And after a gap of quiet, cheers and applause
Audible in the houses across the river,
Some in the audience weeping as if they had melted
Inside the music. Never the same. In Berlin
The daughter of an English lord, in love
With Adolf Hitler, whom she has met. She is taking
Possession of the apartment of a couple,
Elderly well-off Jews. They survive the war
To settle here in the Bay, the old lady
Teaches piano, but the whole world swivels
And gapes at their feet as the girl and a high-up Nazi
Examine the furniture, the glass, the pictures,
The elegant story that was theirs and now
Is a part of hers. A few months later the English
Enter the war and she shoots herself in a park,
An addled, upper-class girl, her life that passes
Into the lives of others or into a place.
The taking of lives? -- the Chief and Mrs. W.
Took theirs to stay together, as local ghosts.
Last flurries of kisses, the revolver's barrel,
Shivers of a story that a child might hear
And half remember, voices in the rushes,
A singing in the willows. From across the river,
Faint quavers of music, the same phrase twice and again,
Ranging and building. Over the high new bridge
The flashing of traffic homeward from the racetrack,
With one boat chugging under the arches, outward
Unnoticed through Pleasure Bay to the open sea.
Here's where the people stood to watch the theater
Burn on the water. All that night the fireboats
Kept playing their spouts of water into the blaze.
In the morning, smoking pilasters and beams.
Black smell of char for weeks, the ruin already
Soaking back into the river. After you die
You hover near the ceiling above your body
And watch the mourners awhile. A few days more
You float above the heads of the ones you knew
And watch them through a twilight. As it grows darker
You wander off and find your way to the river
And wade across. On the other side, night air,
Willows, the smell of the river, and a mass
Of sleeping bodies all along the bank,
A kind of singing from among the rushes
Calling you further forward in the dark.
You lie down and embrace one body, the limbs
Heavy with sleep reach eagerly up around you
And you make love until your soul brims up
And burns free out of you and shifts and spills
Down over into that other body, and you
Forget the life you had and begin again
On the same crossing? -- maybe as a child who passes
Through the same place. But never the same way twice.
Here in the daylight, the catbird in the willows,
The new caf 鬠 with a terrace and a landing,
Frogs in the cattails where the swing-bridge was? -Here's where you might have slipped across the water
When you were only a presence, at Pleasure Bay.
What do I make of the way the historical scale of Nazism drifts in and out of this
poem? Can I disclaim the stereotype of Americans as living without the resonance of
history, inhabiting the present with a childlike complacency, an unwitting,
unreflecting arrogance? I have tended to dwell in and on the past, but that is not
exactly a defense: What is more unhistorical than the sentiments of nostalgia?
I hope my poem is about loss, not nostalgia, that the tenor singing an Italian aria,
like the ruined pilasters of the theater, suggests an historical dimension of loss.
Small things can do that: In Czeslaw Milosz's great poem "Song on Porcelain," a
poem of the immediate aftermath of World War II in Poland, millions murdered,
every family in mourning and Warsaw in rubble, Milosz writes:
Of all things broken and lost,
The porcelain troubles me most.
I remember this poem being hissed once at Berkeley. I think the person who made
that noise would have preferred Milosz to say that of all things broken and lost, the
dead Jews troubled him most.
But that did not need saying, and that also would lack precisely the historical
dimension of the broken porcelain, product of the old Europe that imagined itself
civilized, that painted shepherdesses on teacups and that bit and slashed and tore
itself apart.
I ask these questions of my own poem, and invoke such an exacting comparison for
it, partly in light of a new national concern with a date. In the first weeks after
September 11, 2001, a kindly reader of my work suggested to me that some
American poet should devise a name for the suicidal attacks that turned 767's into
populated weapons, hurtling into the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon.
But even that early, it was clear that those events already had been given their
name. The name is the date, established by an appalled consensus, beyond writerly
volition, as it is beyond official decree.
This may be something new for us. European streets and plazas, and South
American ones, are named for dates, as ours are not. There are countries where
even a month, in phrases like "The October" or "The August," call up an entire
manifold tale of public fate, a textured fistful of cataclysm and shame, heroism and
grudge.
Aside from the Fourth of July, such naming by date has not provided an American
civic shorthand. The bloodstained passages of our Civil War are called by place
names: Antietam, Gettysburg, Shiloh, Andersonville. The struggles of our labor
movement and civil rights are evoked by the names of protagonists: Sacco and
Vanzetti, Rosa Parks, Cheney and Schwerner. November 22 has some force -- and
the memorable numerical symmetry of 11/22 -- but that day's significance, which in
1963 seemed to be the loss of large political and cultural hopes, has become
something more personal or familial, a crucial unfolding in our national iconography,
a matter of symbols more than realities. Only the four digits of 1968, the year of
assassinations, of disorders, and a Presidential contest that evoked both tragedy and
farce, may have the enduring emotional force that evokes epic memory from the
mere laconic stuff of the calendar. Between 1776 and the present, 1968 comes
closest to attaining the status of a word as 1789 and 1848 [a year of revolutions in
Europe] and 1914 are words. Yeats's "Easter 1916" does not sound like an American
title. Can it be that in the United States we shy away from the monumental
shorthand of dates and years from an intuitive national preference for the vague, the
untemporal paradise of the nostalgic?
I confront that possibility unhappily. I think of myself as having drunk a little history
since childhood. One of my covert vanities has been that I have always had some
sense of the past, was born with that sense -- though rudimentary and dreamlike in
a way that places me as a child in a car watching the slow turning of the swing
bridge, that functional interruption of the linear road as poetry perhaps functionally
interrupts the linear conception of time.
My great-grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Maybe that
immigrant story includes an inherent desire to efface dates and specificities. Like
Faulkner's savage would-be founders of dynasties, immigrants -- perhaps Jewish
immigrants in particular -- sometimes turn their faces away from the past.
For many Americans, our most central moralized history, our most nearly epic story
of what in the Renaissance was called "true history," meaning moralized or
instructive history, is the story of how in a generation or less it is possible to become
American. No small part of the racial divide in our country has to do with the
contrast between that story and the story of the African slaves, denied that process
for so long that only recently has the hyphenated "African-American" made its way
tentatively into our language.
For me as a child, the history of Jewish immigrants, and of other groups as well, was
merged with the remarkable history of my town. Let me become for a moment what
the Italians call a campanilista, a pointer-out of local belltowers and such.
Abraham Lincoln visited the seashore resort of Long Branch, New Jersey. In Long
Branch famous 19th-century gamblers endowed fire companies named after
themselves, the way tamer eminences endowed colleges. In Long Branch, the
sporting figure Diamond Jim Brady entertained Lillian Russell, gliding along the ocean
at dusk in an early electric automobile, the crystal passenger compartment
illuminated and the chauffeur in darkness, so that the large-bodied, extravagantly
draperied and tailored lovers could be seen as though in a moving department-store
display window. Behind them, a noiseless parade of three spare vehicles in case the
main one failed, each with its driver.
On the same promenade, President Grant drove his team of fast horses. To draw the
fashionable crowds on the Long Branch boardwalk, Harper's magazine assigned
Winslow Homer, whose great painting "Long Branch, New Jersey" hangs in the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. When President Garfield was shot one June in a
Washington train station by the politicized madman Guiteau, the President was on
his way to Long Branch for vacation. Guiteau had stalked him in the Long Branch
church now known as "The Church of Six Presidents." After the shooting, Garfield
lingered for weeks in the Washington heat, tormented by doctors still ignorant of
sepsis, eager for the honor of poking their fingers into Garfield's wounds in search of
a missing bullet. The Potomac swamps grew malarial, and to avoid the merciless
heat the President on his mattress was carried, past futile muslin sheets soaked in
icewater and hung in the White House, to a special railroad car packed with ice and
special springs. The car went up the coast to Long Branch, where men worked all
night to build a railway spur from the Elberon station to a seaside cottage. People
from the hotels brought the workers coffee and sandwiches, and the spur was
finished in time for Garfield to be carried, still on the same mattress, from the car to
the cottage, where he spent his final weeks comforted by Atlantic breezes.
I could go on. Such are the strands of provincial history for the inveterate
campanilista. The town's second glorious period was in the first decades of the 20th
century, when it was a prosperous getaway spot for middle class families from New
York and Philadelphia. Boats from New York delivered passengers for a night of
theater and a shore dinner at Price's Hotel. A good number of these visitors were
Jewish or Italian, as were the local merchants. There was a raffish note to the place,
thanks to the race track I mention in "At Pleasure Bay."
When I was a child, the town had fallen from both its 19th-century glory and the
prosperity of the 1920s, in the '50s still clinging to a fading boardwalk of clam-bars,
kiddy-rides, wheels of fortune, pinball parlors, and taffy stands. Summer resorts are
elegiac most of the year, and a resort with its best days behind it is doubly elegiac.
"The town is not what it used to be." I grew up hearing this resigned sentence, a
choral sigh, and a sloppy but impressionable quality in my intelligence prevented me
from efficiently distinguishing the decline of business from the deaths of presidents.
My grandfather Pinsky's bar, the Broadway Tavern, was on the same block as the
Garfield-Grant hotel. The civic, historical stature of the dead presidents for whom the
still-elegant hotel was named blended in my mind with the name "Broadway," which
seemed to run from Manhattan to the door of the tavern, with its liquorous perfume.
Before the bar, in the prosperous '20s, the family business had been the smuggling
and distribution of illegal booze. The tales of gangster days interpenetrated with
stories of when the Summer White House was in our town.
That vague, misty, and unquantified past seems the contrary of dates. But after all
dates, too, are notoriously sentimentalized, politically exploited, distorted, spun out
into fabrics like pink sugar or concentrated into murderous weapons. The tale of the
lovers, the provincial Paolo and Francesca in their convertible, the tale of the couple
who survive, the names of the boats, the aria, the theater on the water -- all are
historical, all come down from dark or brilliant sources upriver from us, all are rooted
in our desires and pleasures as well as in what William Shakespeare calls "death's
dateless night."